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O R I EN T AL I SM A N D L IT E RA TU RE

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary

studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the
concept’s evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated
in literature. Part I considers Orientalism’s origins and its geographi-
cal and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and
trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field, such as the
eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible and Victorian
Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said’s
Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions
it has inspired (e.g. colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and
travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future
applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in
the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in
the operation of power, and how in new forms, Neo-Orientalism and
Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to
journalism.

geoffrey p. nash is a Research Associate at the School of African

and Oriental Studies, University of London. He is the author/editor
of: Marmaduke Pickthall, Islam and the Modern World (2017);
Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture and Film
(2014); Writing Muslim Identity (2012); and Comte de Gobineau and
Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings (2008).
cambridge critical concepts
Cambridge Critical Concepts focuses on the important ideas animating twentieth-
and twenty-first-century literary studies. Each concept addressed in the series has
had a profound impact on literary studies, as well as on other disciplines, and
already has a substantial critical bibliography surrounding it. This series captures
the dynamic critical energies transmitted across twentieth- and twenty-first-
century literary landscapes: the concepts critics bring to reading, interpretation
and criticism. By addressing the origins, development and application of these
ideas, the books collate and clarify how these particular concepts have developed,
while also featuring fresh insights and establishing new lines of enquiry.
Cambridge Critical Concepts shifts the focus from period- or genre-based literary
studies of key terms to the history and development of the terms themselves. Broad
and detailed contributions cumulatively identify and investigate the various
historical and cultural catalysts that made these critical concepts emerge as
established twenty-first-century landmarks in the discipline. The level will be
suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduates and specialists, as well as for
those teaching outside their own research areas, and will have cross-disciplinary
relevance for subjects such as history and philosophy.

Published Titles
Law and Literature
Edited by Kieran Dolin University of Western Australia
Time and Literature
Edited by Thomas M. Allen University of Ottawa
The Global South and Literature
Edited by Russell West-Pavlov University of Tübingen
Trauma and Literature
Edited by Roger Kurtz The College at Brockport, State University of New York
Food and Literature
Edited by Gitanjali Shahani San Francisco State University
Animals, Animality, and Literature
Edited by Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand and Brian Massumi Florida State
University, University of Montreal
Terrorism and Literature
Edited by Peter Herman San Diego State University
Orientalism and Literature
Edited by Geoffrey P. Nash SOAS, University of London
Forthcoming Titles
Technology and Literature
Edited by Adam Hammond University of Toronto
Affect and Literature
Edited by Alex Houen University of Cambridge
Climate and Literature
Edited by Adeline Johns University of Surrey
Decadence and Literature
Edited by Jane Desmarais, Goldsmiths, University of London, and David Weir,
The Cooper Union
ORIENTALISM AND
LITERATURE

edited by
GEOFFREY P. NASH
SOAS, University of London
University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
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Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108499002
doi: 10.1017/9781108614672
© Cambridge University Press 2019
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2019
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Nash, Geoffrey, editor.
title: Orientalism and literature / edited by Geoffrey P. Nash.
description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press,
2019. | Series: Cambridge critical concepts | Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2019004122 | isbn 9781108499002 (hardback : alk. paper)
subjects: lcsh: Orientalism in literature. | Orientalism.
classification: lcc pn56.3.o74 o746 2019 | ddc 809/.933585–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004122
isbn 978-1-108-49900-2 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
O R I EN T AL I SM A N D L IT E RA TU RE

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary

geoffrey p. nash is a Research Associate at the School of African

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary

geoffrey p. nash is a Research Associate at the School of African

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary

geoffrey p. nash is a Research Associate at the School of African

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

List of Contributors page ix

Acknowledgments xiv

Introduction 1
Geoffrey P. Nash

part i origins 33
1 Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century 35
Suvir Kaul
2 The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale 50
James Watt
3 Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism 66
Saree Makdisi
4 The Victorians: Empire and the East 82
Sukanya Banerjee
5 Orientalism and Victorian Fiction 101
Daniel Bivona
6 Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites 117
Christopher Hutton
7 Orientalism and the Bible 133
Ivan Kalmar

part ii development 149

8 Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject 151
Eleanor Byrne

vii
viii Contents
9 The Harem: Gendering Orientalism 166
Reina Lewis
10 Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing 185
Ali Behdad
11 Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism 202
David Weir
12 Edward Said and Resistance in Colonial and Postcolonial
Literatures 219
Valerie Kennedy
13 Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? 235
Andrew C. Long

part iii application 253

14 From Orientalism to Islamophobia 255
Mahmut Mutman
15 Applications of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia in Recent
Writing 269
Peter Morey
16 Orientalism and Cultural Translation: Middle Eastern
American Writing 286
Carol W. N. Fadda
17 New Orientalism and the American Media: New York
Cleopatra and Saudi “Giggly Black Ghosts” 306
Moneera Al-Ghadeer
18 On Orientalism’s Future(s) 323
Anouar Majid
19 “The Engine of Survival”: A Future For Orientalism 337
Patrick Williams

sukanya banerjee is Associate Professor in the Department of English

at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her monograph, Becoming
Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (2010), was
awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize given by NVSA for Best First Book
in Victorian Studies, 2012. She is co-editor of New Routes for Diaspora
Studies (2012); her essays have appeared in such journals as Victorian
Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Prose Studies and Diaspora.
ali behdad is John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature and Professor of
English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is the author of
Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution
(1994), A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the
United States (2005) and Camera Orientalis: Reﬂections on Photography of
the Middle East (2016). He is also the coeditor of A Companion to
Comparative Literature (2011) and Photography’s Orientalism: New
Essays on Colonial Representation (2013).
daniel bivona teaches nineteenth-century British literature at Arizona
State University. He has published a number of books and essays,
including British Imperial Literature, 1870–1940: Writing and the
Administration of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His
most recent book is a collection coedited with Marlene Tromp entitled
Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics
(2016), and he is currently at work on a monograph on character,
competition and cooperation in the Victorian age.
eleanor byrne is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at
Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research and teaching cover
postcolonial literature and theory, contemporary British and US litera-
ture, and queer theory. Recent work has included “Hanya Yanagihara’s
Dark Archaeology of Anthropology” (Interventions, 2018) and “The

ix
x List of Contributors
Globalised Garden: Jamaica Kincaid’s Postcolonial Gothic”
(WAGADU: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies,
2018). She was co-investigator on the British Academy-funded network
Troubling Globalisation: Arts and Humanities Approaches
(2016–2017). She is currently researching a monograph on tropical and
ecogothic literature in the Caribbean, Hawaii and the Pacific.
carol w. n. fadda is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University.
She is a recipient of an NEH summer grant, a Future of Minority Studies
Fellowship and a Syracuse University Humanities Center Faculty
Fellowship, and her essays on gender, race, ethnicity, war trauma and
transnational citizenship in Arab and Arab American literary texts have
appeared in a variety of journals and edited collections. She is the author of
Contemporary Arab American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of
Home and Belonging (2014) and serves as the editor of the Critical Arab
American Studies book series at Syracuse University Press.
moneera al-ghadeer was Visiting Professor at Columbia University
(Fall and Spring 2015) and Shawwaf Visiting Professor at Harvard
University (Fall 2014). She was formerly Associate Professor at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison (2001–2010). She received her PhD
in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
She has published a number of articles and a book titled Desert Voices:
Bedouin Women’s Poetry in Saudi Arabia (2009).
christopher hutton is Chair Professor in the School of English at the
University of Hong Kong. Publications include Linguistics and the Third
Reich (1999), Race and the Third Reich (2005), Definition in Theory and
Practice (with Roy Harris, 2007), Word Meaning and Legal Interpretation
(2014) and Signs, Meaning and Experience (with Adrian Pablé, 2015).
ivan kalmar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.
Kalmar’s work focuses on the image of Jews and Muslims in Western
cultural history. He is the author of The Trotskys, Freuds, and Woody
Allens (1993) and Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of
Sublime Power (2013) and coeditor of the volume Orientalism and the
Jews (2004). He has recently guest-edited an issue of Patterns of
Prejudice, dealing with Islamophobia in the east of the European Union.
suvir kaul is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is the author of Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir,
Poetry, Politics (2015), Eighteenth-Century British Literature and
List of Contributors xi
Postcolonial Studies (2009), Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English
Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (2000) and Thomas Gray and
Literary Authority: Ideology and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England
(1992). He has edited The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the
Division of India (2001) and coedited Postcolonial Studies and Beyond
(2005).
valerie kennedy teaches English and world literatures at Bilkent
University, Ankara, Turkey. Her scholarly interests include Edward
Said, Orientalism, postcolonial and travel writing, and Charles Dickens.
Her publications include Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (2000),
translated into Chinese complex characters, simplified Chinese, Korean
and Arabic; “Orientalism” in the online Oxford Bibliography of Victorian
Literature (2013); and “Orientalism in the Victorian Era” in the online
Oxford Research Encyclopedia (2017).
reina lewis is Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of
Fashion, UAL. Her books include Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style
Cultures (2015), Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman
Harem (2004) and Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and
Representation (1996). She is editor of Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies,
Mediating Faith (2013). She is a frequent media commentator, including
for the New York Times, Le Monde, BBC television and radio, The
Economist, The Guardian, The Times, Vogue Arabia, Businessoffashion
.com, Fortune.com and the Huffington Post. She convenes the public
talk series Faith & Fashion at the London College of Fashion.
andrew c. long teaches writing, literature and media studies in the
Claremont Colleges. He also taught at the American University of
Beirut and in the City University of New York system, where he earned
his PhD in comparative literature. He has published essays in Nineteenth
Century Literature, Studies in the Novel, Banipal and Middle East
Critique. He is the author of Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the
Age of Mass Publication, 1880 to 1930 (2014).
anouar majid is Professor of English and founding director of the
Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England in
Maine, USA. He is the author of five critically acclaimed books on Islam
and the West and one novel. He also edits and writes for the online
magazine Tingis.
xii List of Contributors
saree makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
UCLA. His most recent book is Reading William Blake (Cambridge
University Press, 2015). He is also the author of Making England Western:
Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (2014), Palestine Inside Out: An
Everyday Occupation (2010), William Blake and the Impossible History of the
1790s (2003) and Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press,
1998). He is presently working on a study entitled London’s Modernities,
on the mapping and unmapping of London from the nineteenth century to
the present.
peter morey is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the
University of Birmingham. He works on colonial and postcolonial
literature with special reference to South Asia and its diaspora. He is
the author of Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (2000), Rohinton
Mistry (2004), Framing Muslims (2011) and Islamophobia and the Novel
(2018). He has also coedited several volumes, written numerous articles
and led two international research projects on Muslims and the West.
mahmut mutman is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Advanced
Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. He is the author of
The Politics of Writing Islam: Voicing Difference (2013) as well as several
articles on Orientalism, nationalism, Islamism and cultural theory pub-
lished in Cultural Critique, Third Text, Rethinking Marxism, Postmodern
Culture, Anthropological Theory, Parallax, Radical Philosophy and New
Formations.
geoffrey p. nash is Research Associate at SOAS, University of London.
Working in the field of British–Islamicate intercultural contact, his
books include Marmaduke Pickthall, Islam and the Modern World
(2017), Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture and Film
(2014), Writing Muslim Identity (2012), Comte de Gobineau and
Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings (2008) and From Empire to
Orient: Travellers to the Middle East, 1830–1926 (2005).
james watt teaches in the Department of English and Related Literature
and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of
York. He is the author of Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and
Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and
British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (Cambridge University Press, forthcom-
ing). He is currently working on a study of popular Orientalism in the
Romantic period, provisionally titled The Comedy of Difference.
List of Contributors xiii
david weir had a thirty-year career teaching literature, linguistics and
cinema in New York City at The Cooper Union, where he was named
Professor Emeritus in 2015. He has published books on Jean Vigo, James
Joyce, William Blake, Orientalism, anarchism and decadence. He now
lives in a Hudson Valley village in upstate New York.
patrick williams is Emeritus Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
at Nottingham Trent University, where he taught courses on postcolo-
nial theory and culture, film, diaspora, and race and nation. His pub-
lications include Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (1993),
Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (1996), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1999),
Edward Said (2000) and Postcolonial African Cinema (2007). He is on
the editorial boards of Theory, Culture and Society and Journal of
Postcolonial Writing.
Acknowledgments

I wish to extend my thanks to Ray Ryan, as the mover behind this volume,
and to the contributors, whose skill, knowledge and effort it showcases.
Thanks also to Mina, for her unending patience, and to those of my
colleagues who have waited a long time for me to ﬁnish the project and
move on and engage in new collaborations.

xiv
Introduction
Geoffrey P. Nash

What is the relationship between Orientalism and literature, and how does
it aid us in our reading? Orientalism and Literature sets out to interrogate
a key critical concept in literary studies and has the aim of reviewing the
evolution of the concept as it has been explored, imagined and narrated in
literature. Building upon existing scholarship, the aim is to give readers
a comprehensive grasp of the origins and present contours of Orientalism
and to point out future directions in this field. In the early eighteenth
century the term designated scholarship on the East, as well as a style in the
arts. Interest in the study of Oriental languages led to the establishment of
Orientalism as a profession. Although it continued as a discipline for well
over two centuries, its scope developed beyond its philological beginnings
and its vaguely defined existence as a literary or artistic topic or style. Then,
in the 1960s and 1970s, the academic credibility of Orientalism as an
institutionalized discipline began to be contested, and, after Edward
Said’s epoch-making volume Orientalism: Western Perceptions of the
Orient (1978), the term underwent wholesale re-evaluation. From
a literary studies perspective, the value of Said’s work is that it probes
foundations of the relationship between the West and its other in the
context of the creation of the modern world, as seen through the lens of
culture and literature. Said focused on Orientalism in Britain and France,
as well as in the United States from the second half of the twentieth
century. He was criticized for neglecting the other European traditions
of Orientalism – most notably the German, and to a lesser extent the
Russian, while in his Introduction to Orientalism, Said also extended the
list to Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, and Swiss versions. His
primary interest was in the most recent empires; subsequent scholarship
has examined the other European traditions, as well as nineteenth-century
American Orientalism. This volume, however, is not intended as a survey
of Orientalism tout court, and of necessity the focus falls primarily on
Orientalism in British and Anglophone literary history – although
1
2 geoffrey p. nash
a French dimension, so vital to Said’s argument especially with respect to
imaginative Orientalism, is retained in some chapters.
The volume both surveys and references the more important perspec-
tives on Orientalism and attempts explication of their varied arguments
insofar as they pertain and add value to the reader’s understanding of
Orientalism as a critical concept within literary studies. In this respect, it
should also be useful as a pedagogical tool.
It is constructed around four dimensions, which do not exclusively
correlate with separate parts but are found to varying degrees throughout
the different chapters.
The first dimension is the relationship between Orientalism and literary
studies. In terms of literary representation, Orientalism started out as
a style, a taste, a stimulus of imaginative escape and fantasy. Said’s con-
ception of Orientalism transformed the term into a critical concept that
continues to inform our reading of literature. In his Introduction to
Orientalism, whilst defining Orientalism as a style “based upon an onto-
logical and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of
the time) ‘the Occident,’” Said continued to stress the significance of
writing as discourse: “Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom
are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and
imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East
and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social
descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people,
customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on. This Orientalism can accommodate
Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx.”1 Indeed it is vital
for our purposes that in his investigation of the construction of Orientalist
discourse Said neither follows Foucault’s focus on peripheral documents
nor figures historians or social scientists; he instead concentrates primarily
on literary texts.
The second dimension this volume seeks to address is the methodological
relationship between culture and power set out in Orientalism. “For students
of literature and criticism, Orientalism offers a marvelous instance of the
interrelations between society, history, and textuality” (p. 24). The inno-
vatory and controversial core of Said’s work was the manner in which it
asserted Orientalism’s complex connections with ideology, politics and
power on the one hand and culture on the other. Alongside this went the
insistence that, while it might purport to be a “combination of the
empirical and the imaginative,” Orientalism as an idea about
a geographical entity – the Orient – “derives to a great extent from the
impulse not simply to describe [the Orient], but also to dominate and
Introduction 3
somehow to defend against it.”2 Rather than delineating a reality outside of
itself, Orientalism constituted a discourse by means of which Western
countries like Britain and France constructed their Other and in so doing
projected their own identity. This process was “bound up with the dis-
position of power and powerlessness in each society and . . . anything but
mere academic wool-gathering” (p. 332). Of vital importance for the
student is to gain an understanding of the relationship between power
and the creation of culture and how literature interfaces with this; how
images of the East that purported to disclose its irrational, static and
unchanging, female essence were predicated on the rationality and mascu-
line dynamism of the Occident.
The third dimension is the multidisciplinary context in which Orientalism
has been viewed. A professor of comparative and English literature, Said
brought an expertise in textual hermeneutics to his treatment of a subject
that transcended the limits of literary studies as then construed.
Orientalism shone new light on well-established areas of academic study,
such as the historiography of British rule in India, the debate over the
relationship of Ancient Greek civilization to North Africa and Asia, and
the study of Buddhism and Hinduism. In the Afterword to the 1995
reprinting, Said saw his book as re-invigorating “study of Africanist and
Indological discourses, the analyses of subaltern history, the reconfigura-
tion of postcolonial anthropology, political science, art history, literary
criticism” (p. 340). Orientalism therefore helped effect an enlargement of
literary studies beyond the formalistic and narrowly liberal humanistic
axioms that had previously informed it.
A fourth dimension to be considered is the scholarly reception and
development of Said’s ideas. Intellectual contestation and critical engage-
ment were an important part of the development of his concept of
Orientalism as an expansive category, primary instances being the influ-
ence of Orientalism upon the creation of postcolonial studies and the
affects that outside perspectives – for example feminist studies – have
had on readings of Orientalism and its application to culture and literature.
Numerous studies since its publication have exemplified, expanded or
contested specific topic areas contained within Said’s book, alongside
focusing on aspects they consider insufficiently developed by Said or in
need of refinement, as well as ones that branch out into new regions.
The first, second and third dimensions feature in Part I, Origins, which
considers issues concerning the temporality of Orientalism, when it starts
and what Said’s claims for its geographical and multidisciplinary scope are
before moving on to consider the major genres and trends Orientalism
4 geoffrey p. nash
inspired in the literary-critical field: the Oriental tale, eighteenth-century
Orientalism, Romantic Orientalism, and Orientalism and empire.
Part II, Development, recaptures specific aspects of Orientalism’s devel-
opments: its multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions with
regard to postcolonialism, colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism
and travel writing, as well as the critical ideas which form the core of such
interventions. Part III, Application, deliberates upon recent and possible
future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness
in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in
the operation of power, and how in new forms, Neo-Orientalism and
Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to
journalism.

Part I: Origins

The Beginnings of Orientalism

Said’s claims for the beginnings and the scope of Orientalism, ranging
from the Greco-Persian Wars of antiquity to the present day, have of
course invited a great deal of criticism. Actually, he proffers two alternative
beginnings and spaces: premodern Orientalism, consisting of the classical
world and the period from the Medieval to the Renaissance; and modern
Orientalism, beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1789.
Employing a discourse perspective derived from Foucault, Said envisages
an Occident/Orient binary according to which Orientalism “originated
not in the eighteenth century or thereabouts, but in the period of Homer’s
Iliad, Aeschylus’ The Persians, and Euripedes’ The Bacchae”; this “binary
division was repeatedly reinforced by Roman geographers, historians and
public figures (Herodotus, Alexander, Caesar), Medieval merchants, wri-
ters and crusaders . . . and Medieval Christian writers and polemicists
(Dante, John of Segovia, Nicholas of Cusa).”3 In recent decades, postco-
lonial medievalists, in the process of disrupting and fragmenting “the clean
and easy identity narratives that cultures tell themselves, offering divisions
that stress difference, conflict and . . . ‘widely scattered contingencies’” and
recovering the medieval from its characterization as “wholly other,” have
been indebted to Said’s exposure of the colonialist power lurking behind
the “seeming naturalness of ‘truth,’” at the same time as they have debated
his “thesis that East and West have always been arranged along a binary
axis, where the Orient exists only to the extent that it mirrors fantastically
its colonizer.”4 Briefly, Lisa Lampert-Weissig summarizes the main issues
Introduction 5
postcolonial medievalists have with Orientalism’s binary treatment of the
period as follows: a) cultural interchange existed (specifically in medieval
Iberia, Sicily and the Crusader states) “that cannot be reduced to a one-
sided attempt by Western European thinkers to understand or control the
East, as Said describes in modern Orientalism”; b) Said’s reading of
Dante’s insertion into his Inferno of Muslim figures, preeminently the
Prophet Muhammad, is “a reductive Orientalist view” that argues Dante
could only understand them within a fixed Christian cosmology, whereas
his views on Islam were “more complex and ambivalent”; c) the tempor-
ality of the Middle Ages in Orientalism is itself schematic and conflates
“disparate premodern historical moments, end[ing] up figuring [the per-
iod] as a site of historical origin but also as a moment that exists before ‘the
movement of history.’”5
In her recent study of medieval Orientalism, Idols of the East, Suzanne
Conklin Akbari confirms the significance of Said’s work but raises its
periodization and how Orientalism might be historicized. Akbari points
out that Said “elides the narrative of Roman imperial power” and ignores
Europe’s decline over the spectrum of technological and cultural produc-
tion during the medieval period, sinking into a position of inferiority vis-à-
vis an ascendant Islamic world. “For most of that period, the dominant
power in the world was not the Christian West but rather the Islamic East,
and European awareness of that inferiority played a crucial role in the
development of Orientalism.”6 The overwhelming dominance of
Orientalist discourse is therefore far more applicable to the inauguration
of the modern global world and its emphasis on imperial power compared
with the phase of antiquity and medievalism. Akbari, who is particularly
exercised by Said’s employment of the phrase “imaginative geography”
stimulated by Foucault’s habit of analyzing actual spaces, territories and
sites, proposes that this term could fruitfully be applied to a wide variety of
medieval texts, particularly maps, to the end of understanding how the
imaginative geographies of Orient or Occident are established.

Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century

Said’s “monolithic and hegemonic version of Orientalism as a discursive
formation, transportable and translatable to any time and place,” has,
according to Claire Gallien and Olivera Jokic, presented eighteenth-
century scholars with similar problems to those raised by postcolonial
medievalists. Said’s elision of periods prior to Bonaparte’s expedition to
Egypt in 1798 have both perplexed and encouraged them “to take up the
6 geoffrey p. nash
question of Orientalism.”7 For Said, the later eighteenth-century and
Romantic periods advanced Europe’s scientific claim to extensive and
organized knowledge about the “East.” Suvir Kaul contends that “by the
eighteenth century, and in some cases, well before, the ways of seeing that
we associate with colonialism and imperialism are convincingly in place.”8
If that is the case, the argument that Said’s emphasis falls upon one event
and misses out some beside is an unbalanced one. Raymond Schwab’s
Oriental Renaissance (1950), in some respects Orientalism’s analogue, com-
prehends the significance of European intervention in the East. It estab-
lished the later eighteenth century as a new point of departure, starting
with the philological breakthroughs by Anquetil-Dupperont in France and
Sir William Jones and his contemporaries in British India, the latter
coinciding with the spread of Britain’s political and economic power in
the East. However, Schwab, who saw Orientalism as integral to the devel-
opment of European literary and philosophical Romanticism, was opti-
mistic about its crucial importance for, among other things, demonstrating
how Western knowledge accessed the languages and literatures of the East
and made it possible to build a notion of a world consisting of discrete
cultures. Srinivas Avaramudan went so far as to suggest that under different
circumstances Schwab’s contrapuntal reading (to Said’s) could easily have
become mainstream.9 Avaramudan’s own expansive articulation of
Enlightenment Orientalism places more stress on its “utopian aspirations”
than on “materialist and political interest,” its urging towards “mutual
understanding across different cultures” above domination of the other. In
the seventeenth century, Philosophic universalism’s supplanting of
Christianity gave credence to the view that “a transcultural, cosmopolitan,
and Enlightenment-inflected Orientalism existed at least as an alternative
strain before ‘Saidian’ Orientalism came about.”10 However, as Ros
Ballaster notes: “Enthusiasm for the ancient Orient and its languages can
be seen, as it is by Said, as a form of colonial power; European scholars
promise to ‘return’ oriental cultures to a civilized classical heritage from
which they have been estranged by centuries of barbaric and despotic rule.”
In addition, “increased knowledge about oriental cultures and increased
awareness about their differences came with increased contact and con-
sumption of oriental goods at the end of the eighteenth century.”11
Orientalism’s contribution to eighteenth-century literature, according to
Claire Gallien and Olivera Jokic, has been to provide “an analytical frame
to think about matters related to the construction of tropes, the transfor-
mation of Eastern texts as they traveled across countries and continents, the
promotion and demotion of genres, the question of canon formation, the
Introduction 7
birth of the ‘English’ novel, gender, and the impact of other forces than
empire, such as the book market, in determining Orientalist fashions.”12
In “Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century” (Chapter 1), Suvir
Kaul interrogates how overseas commerce facilitating everyday consump-
tion of material objects from the East, and the creation of a new class of
non-aristocratic landed gentry, incited moral diatribes against consump-
tion and luxury. So, “the link between a woman’s vanity, sexuality, and
china is a recurrent trope in early eighteenth-century poetry.” At the same
time, commerce with Asia enabled a widening view that made for eco-
nomic and moral, social and spiritual comparisons, particularly with
China. While retaining dominance in world trade, China’s image in the
West was of a model of stability and governance; however, as this waned in
the wake of Europe’s growing power in trading and colonial ventures, this
image turned to dismissive contempt. Closer to home, envy of the wealth
of the Ottoman empire and the absolute power of the Sultan was shar-
pened by a new emphasis: “Asia was home to slavish subjects, to peoples
who had not yet ascended to political rationality or being, and hence the
playground of despotic power.” Cosmopolitanism went alongside national
chauvinism. Exploring the “possibilities of experience, imagination and
literary innovation opened up by the ‘East,’” Kaul moves to Aravamudan’s
expansionist reading of The Arabian Nights, and William Jones’ poetry,
inspired by translations from Sanskrit and incorporating his admiration for
Hindu divinities, and to the Orientalist style of painting developed by
British artists in India. For example, Johan Zofany’s portrayals of Indians
and British living alongside one another transpose the colonial elite from
England into the landowning aristocracy of India. In Mr and Mrs Warren
Hastings: “The antagonisms of colonialism are caused to dissolve into the
serene platitudes of the conversation piece, and the British presence in, and
authority over, Indian land is naturalized.” A similar if reverse process
occurs at home, where the Chinese style in gardening is anglicized to
become “the English garden.”
In “The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale” (Chapter 2),
James Watt writes of the reception of The Arabian Nights in terms of
a broad “generic hybridity” of the Oriental tale with respect to its origins
and classification, beginning with Galland’s first attempt at translation, the
Indian “Fables of Pilpay,” comprising “a ceaseless movement of narrative”
and incorporating the Orient-flavored stories and anecdotes published in
Spectator, notably “Vision of Mirza.” Anglicized versions of Eastern tales
and moral fables about the times coexisted alongside other forms of fiction;
“playful fantastic possibilities of Oriental fiction” vied with emergent
8 geoffrey p. nash
“national realism,” each “informed by an imaginary geography which
assumes London to be the hub of global commerce.” Defoe’s Roxana
acquires Oriental features, suggesting that, despite the taste for reality
catered for in the eighteenth-century novel, that form too was porous to
what Johnson called “the world of wonder.” Watt points out the multi-
faceted character of Oriental tales that “are concerned with the here and
now and invoke the East as a way of thinking about the condition of
Britain itself.” Allegories of the spread of the British empire were estab-
lished within an Eastern narrative; the American War of independence was
placed in an Eastern setting. The trope of Oriental despotism was invoked
in order to urge safeguarding liberty at home and expose the dangers of
corruption produced by wealth from the Indies. By the 1790s, Orientalism
interposed in stories such as Robert Heron’s pseudo-Oriental Arabian
Tales (1792), which depicted the “unchanging condition of women” and
accentuated the “rhetoric of sexual despotism” while distancing themselves
from the romance of the past. Accounting for the ongoing popularity of the
Arabian Nights into the Romantic period, Watt sets a reading of
Orientalism of the Saidian “will-to-empire” type against ones that figure
the world of the Oriental Tale as “a fictional mode for dreaming with the
Orient” – Aravamudan’s phrase – and, in Ros Ballaster’s words, “an
abandonment of the sense of self to an other in a space in which such
activity is virtually free of risk.”13

Orientalism, Race and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century

Despite Orientalism’s apparent binaries, an important statement early in
the work acknowledges a split within colonial discourse. Bart Moore-
Gilbert paraphrased this as implying that “on the one hand . . . the West
consciously defines the East as outside itself and radically different or
Other; at the same time, the East is also apparently located intimately
within the West as an integral, if generally unacknowledged, part of its own
constitution and identity.”14 In other words, if “the European discourse . . .
invented the Orient [it] just as surely invented itself.”15 Suvir Kaul has
pointed out that “postcolonial scholars who study metropolitan national
cultures . . . argue that the historical force of colonialist practices is also at
work in the domestic political and economic consolidation of the
nation.”16 In “Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism” (Chapter 3),
Saree Makdisi conceptualizes the process by which “Occidentalism defined
British imperial culture not only externally but also from within; it must be
seen to be aligned with an Orientalist logic articulated by Cromer – and
Introduction 9
rightly identified by Said – that would in the long run be directed
exclusively overseas. Occidentalism and Orientalism, in other words, are
not opposites: they are two sides of the same coin, ultimately inseparable
from one another.” Instead of Western civilization being grounded in
terms of Enlightenment and scientific knowledge with the irrational and
fanatical East as its antithesis, the “symbiotic relationship between
Occidentalism and Orientalism” originating in the Romantic period saw
a developing and modernizing West set against an internal opposite. In
practice this meant “Orientaliz[ing] others at home – who were seen to be
just as incompatible with this emergent new identity as their actual Asiatic
counterparts.” From the 1790s these “Orientalist tropes were primarily
deployed by anti-aristocratic radicals not to refer to actual Arabs or Indians
(about whom they knew almost nothing and cared even less) but rather to
refer primarily to either the privileged classes above them in the social
hierarchy or those further down the social scale.” In practice the formula-
tion Makdisi proposes “helps explain why all the way through the
Romantic period the discourse of Orientalism was used at least as much
with reference to the would-be West as it was with reference to the East.”17
In “Orientalist Structures and Restructures” (chapter 2 of Orientalism)
the layered but complicit constituent parts of imperial governance,
Orientalist scholarship and imaginative Orientalism assembled together
provide a lens through which Said probes distinctive Victorian discourses
belonging to the genres of novel and travel writing, philology and anthro-
pology, through each of which run preconceptions of empire, race and
secularized religion.
“The Victorians: Empire and the East” (Chapter 4) begins with Thomas
De Quincey’s opium addiction and a meeting with a Malay visitor that
demonstrates the Englishman’s “deep familiarity with an Eastern com-
modity but [inability] to meaningfully engage with someone from the
‘East.’” Sukanya Banerjee uses De Quincy’s ignorance to frame an
extended discussion of race and empire in the nineteenth century, which
moves through the discovery and application of the Indo-Aryan category
(via the Orientalist scholarship of Sir William Jones and Friedrich
Max Müller) to an anthropological debate conducted between the Indian
Dadabhai Naoroji and John Crawfurd, president of the Ethnological
Society. “These anthropological discussions,” Banerjee argues, “should be
of interest to scholars of literary and cultural studies not just because they
gave shape to Victorian discussions of race but also because Victorian
literature often provides articulation of or catalyst for what was being
tested or established as anthropological theory.” This statement is partly
10 geoffrey p. nash
exemplified by her reading of Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone, where a liberal
attitude toward empire is seen evenly to distribute guilt for theft of the
stone between British and Indian characters before reassertion of an
Orientalist view of fanatical and superstitious colonial subjects in the
novel’s final scene. This denouement is aptly set alongside J. S. Mill’s
denial of India’s readiness for self-rule and assertion of its need for con-
tinuing colonial government.
In “Orientalism and Victorian Fiction” (Chapter 5), Daniel Bivona
explores more imperialist fictional narratives with the aim of tracking
“the gradual displacement of the focus of Oriental fiction from
a fascination with Oriental object to European subject, its gradual move-
ment from a preoccupation with what Disraeli called the ‘Great Asian
Mystery’ to foregrounding what I am calling ‘The Great European
Mystery.’” Choosing “mainly canonical fiction that has for its setting this
constructed Muslim world,” Bivona tests the generic conventions of
Orientalist fiction and its attendant tropes of race, sexuality and misce-
genation. Beginning with the race/Oriental quest leitmotif in Disraeli’s
fiction, focusing on Tancred and its impact on George Eliot’s portrayal of
the eponymous Zionist hero in Daniel Deronda, he proceeds to scalpel
racial and sexual ambiguity in Flora Annie Steel’s less well-known On the
Face of the Waters and more miscegenation plotted into Kipling’s “Without
Benefit of Clergy.” Finally, in Conrad’s Lord Jim, further betrayal of
Eastern women by white lovers leads to the conclusion that “while demys-
tifying European claims to racial superiority [Lord Jim] also captures the
centrality of racial mystique and sexual ambivalence that lay at the heart of
the imperial enterprise.”

Orientalism and the Bible

Race tropes found in Victorian fiction, which almost invariably under-
wrote travelogues too (see Part II), might be said to have their origins
in Biblical paradigms. Christopher Hutton points out in “Orientalism and
Race: Aryans and Semites” (Chapter 6): “European conceptions of
peoples and their lineages took as their point of departure the ‘Mosaic
triad’ of the sons of Noah, namely Shem, Ham and Japhet.” Popularly,
Europeans’ progenitor was Japhet, while Semites were descendants of
Shem and Africans of Ham. Hutton notes that, although the
Biblical model broke down in the eighteenth century owing to the percep-
tion that the genealogical approaches it helped foster were “unsystematic
and fanciful,” the nomenclature persisted, albeit with the substitution of
Introduction 11
Indo-Germanic/Aryan for Japhetic. However, Hutton notes that William
Jones, stalwart of the discovery of the “Aryan” texts that defined Schwab’s
“Oriental Renaissance,” was still working within a Biblical paradigm,
though he did not consider Japhet the ancestor of Europeans, nor did he
employ the term Aryan. Hutton reviews the trail of race via the compara-
tive linguistics paths of Ernest Renan and Max Müller, racial anthropology
(already broached by Banerjee) and Darwinian theory. Charting the route
to ascendancy of the Aryan paradigm via variant shades of German
nationalism, he closes with the salutary truth: “This focus on
Orientalism and Aryanism has obscured a key historical insight: Jews did
not assimilate into European modernity. They were its cocreators, not an
Oriental ‘other’ within it.”
Urs App takes up a strong line in claiming “the role of colonialism (and
generally of economic and political interests) in the birth of Orientalism
dwindles to insignificance compared to the role of religion.”18 According to
Bar-Yousef, in Orientalism Said missed out the specificity of the Orientalist
encounter in the Holy Land.19 However, quite recently scholars have done
much to repopulate the nineteenth-century landscape of Palestine and the
wider Middle East, none more prominently than Ivan Kalmar, who has
demonstrated how imperialist ideas were linked with Protestant evange-
licalism and how the existing population – Jews and Arabs – were conflated
and viewed as ghosts of the biblical original.20 Connections between race,
religion and Orientalism are consolidated by Kalmar in “Orientalism and
the Bible” (Chapter 7). Stressing “the central role of the Bible in
Orientalism [that] has often been overlooked and sometimes actively
denied,” he sets himself the major task of suggesting “some ways to begin
to restore biblical concerns to their due place in the historiography of
Orientalism.” Though he mentioned biblical scholars, Said barely probed
the biblical dimension of Orientalism, choosing to avoid ascribing any
significant religious provenance to it. While he endorsed the significance of
the switch from a Bible-centered description of human origins to the vistas
opened by the Persian and Sanskrit researches of Anquetil-Duperon and
William Jones, Schwab forgot, however, that “the Indologists and
Persianists of the long eighteenth century were, for the most part, fervent
Christians.” Their intention in studying Oriental religions was “not to
supplant the Bible but to affirm it as part of a universal religious truth.”
Rather than spiritual rejuvenation, however, Said derived from the
Oriental Renaissance a discourse of Western domination, which he
found in Silvestre de Sacy and Edward Lane; but where Said was not
interested in biblical philology they, or at least Lane, undoubtedly were.
12 geoffrey p. nash
One of the main tenors of Kalmar’s chapter is to provide a commentary on
Said’s omission of the significant role of biblical study in Orientalism, for
evidence of which we have only to turn to the work of Ernest Renan.
The second part of the chapter scrutinizes ways in which the Semitic and
Aryan categorization, so influential for nineteenth-century European
thought, underwrote Orientalist interpretations of Christianity. These
narratives nonetheless do not undermine Said’s major thesis: while he
and “much of the subsequent literature on Orientalism . . . may have
missed the full force of the Orientalists’ concerns with the Bible, those
concerns did not normally stand in opposition to Orientalism’s colonial
agenda.”

Part II: Development

In this part the development of Said’s work as a critical concept is
considered, in particular how capable it is of elucidating and explaining
literature’s adoption and employment of Orientalist discourses and tropes.
At the point of theoretical capture, Said’s whole project was critically
debated and questioned, and there is no space or need to account for all
of the criticisms directed against Orientalism (especially since this is
a future-oriented volume). However, intellectual contestation and critical
engagement were an important part of the development of his concept of
Orientalism as an expansive category. Diana Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey
Cass wrote of the “many Orientalisms that have populated the theoretical
field,”21 and reservations have continued to surface, some around the idea
that the “multiple meanings of ‘Orientalism’, as well as its various nuances
across languages, [were] obscured in Said’s generalized model of Orientalist
discourse.”22 Engagement with Said’s key critics, interpreters and inter-
locutors is therefore crucial, especially where they are connected with the
reception and reformulation of his ideas. Where he had generalized about
the operation of Orientalist discourses, could arguments be adduced to
demonstrate a wrong emphasis, distortion or erroneous train of thought?
For example, Said’s distinction of “latent” from “manifest” Orientalism is
of particular importance to how literary works relate to Orientalist dis-
course. Latent Orientalism, an unchanging subliminal certainty about
what the East was in essence, according to Said fed imaginative literary
responses, notably the succession of early nineteenth-century French and
British writers whose travel writings Said discusses. But how persuasive was
this distinction? A major concern of Orientalism’s early critics was the
apparently monolithic, closed construct that was Orientalist discourse as
Introduction 13
he derived it from Foucault; as Said applied it, there appeared almost no
space for alternative discourses. Said’s conception of Orientalist discourse
seemed to preclude space for the colonized subaltern and also for opposi-
tional voices within imperial culture. The difficulty was marrying
Gramsci’s insistence that subaltern groups could potentially overturn
dominant power and Foucault’s less optimistic view. Along with this, the
binary relationship between the Westerner and the Easterner left no scope
for interaction; in fact, as constituted, this division between abstract
entities – East/West, Occident/Orient – was judged inflexible and dis-
allowing of the complexities of cultural exchange.
At the same time as revisions of Orientalism began to appear in the
critical work of the 1980s, refining his own work in Culture and Imperialism
(1993) Said elaborated on aspects missing from Orientalism such as gender
and colonial resistance. Addressing the charge that Orientalist discourse
was a “monolith,” he probed the possibilities of postcolonial resistance –
the “voyage in” (and “writing back”) of “Third World Writers” in the
metropolitan center – while largely denying this valence to native writing
of the colonial period.23 In the later work, Said raised the struggles of
decolonization, praising especially the work of Aimé Césaire and Ngũgı̃ wa
Thiong’o, but also reintroduced the imperial dimension in extended read-
ings of canonical texts such as Kipling’s Kim and Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness and, for the first time, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Culture
and Imperialism suggested Joseph Conrad’s position as an outsider enabled
his understanding of how imperialism worked and appeared to exclude
Conrad from the charge of racism on the grounds of being a modern writer
who did not belong to the imperial world.

The Colonial Subject, Sexuality, Gender

This section probes some of the ways in which Said’s ideas were challenged,
developed and revised, in the critical works of others as well as in his own.
It begins with Homi Bhabha’s departure from Said’s version of colonial
discourse, which inserted greater ambivalence and ambiguity into the
colonizer’s relationship with the colonized. According to Peter Childs
and Patrick Williams, Bhabha saw Said’s approach to colonial discourse
as “too reliant on oversimplifying binaries such as East and West, colonizer
and colonized, latent and manifest Orientalism . . . while Said discusses the
differences and oppositions between colonizer and colonized, Bhabha
often examines their points of similarity and considers, for example, the
stereotype as the cardinal point of colonial subjectification for both of
14 geoffrey p. nash
them.”24 Bhabha’s invention and application of terms and expressions,
such as “colonial mimicry,” “sly civility,” “signs taken for wonders” and
“hybridity,” draw the colonizer and the colonized into much more inti-
mate relation than Said had allowed for, calling into question Orientalism’s
putative monolithic separation of the Orientalist and Orientalist discourse
from the object of this discourse, the voiceless Oriental. Although
Bhabha’s interpretation of texts largely taken from colonial India has,
like Said’s before him, been challenged for its occlusion of historical
contexts – in Bhabha’s case, the product of his emphasis on postmodernist
modes and his employment of psychoanalysis – such debates around the
meanings of colonial discourse should be viewed as instances of
Orientalism’s productive power.25
In “Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject” (Chapter 8), Eleanor
Byrne reviews the space in which Homi Bhabha inserted new ways of
reading colonial culture in the context of poststructuralist and postcoloni-
alist ways of thinking. She notes in particular that Bhabha’s “reading of
interactions between colonizers and colonized peoples resituated Said’s
model of colonial discourse counterintuitively, as something that does
not only facilitate the embedding of colonial systems of power . . .
Bhabha develops Said’s particular models of discourse analysis in
Orientalism, demonstrating that colonial discourse was not monolithic
but internally riven . . . [Furthermore,] contrary to Said’s Orientalism, . . .
colonial discourse is not ‘in control’ of its meanings . . . [It] only operates as
the moment of being interpreted, where it ‘lands’, and as such there is
always an element of reversal or compromise or interpretation.”
Employing a number of the aforementioned categories from Bhabha’s
work – and with further help from Robert Young and Susan Suleri –
Byrne stages a reading of several key scenes from A Passage to India, in
which menace, fetishism and the colonizers’ fear of their “own cultural
ignorance” are each figured as constitutive of the “colonial nonsense”
within the colonial encounter.
The “monolithic” structure of Orientalism was further questioned by
Lisa Lowe, who emphasized its unstable character as well as re-presenting
the figure of Lady Wortley Montagu as feminist icon;26 and by those who
addressed absent women’s voices – notably, Sara Mills, Billie Melman,
Reina Lewis and Meyda Yeǧ enǧ olu, each of whom have combined Saidian
analysis with feminist thought.27 Revisiting her earlier interventions, in
“The Harem: Gendering Orientalism” (Chapter 9) Reina Lewis again
takes up Said’s methodological encapsulation of Orientalism as a “study
[of] the interrelations between society, history, and textuality”; she reviews
Introduction 15
feminist scholarship’s insertion of the harem and its corollary the veil into
Said’s polemic. The survey is updated to view recent “articulations and
understandings of gender, ethnicity, class, religion and sexuality,” as seen
in new research on the place of eunuchs in segregated households that
continued into the twentieth century and on the women-led Muslim
fashion industry of the last two decades. In the early twentieth century,
there was interplay between Western and Ottoman women, the former
recording how “the shift away from the sequestered world of eunuchs and
slaves into companionate nuclear family life came to mark personal mod-
ernity for the progressive Ottoman and regional elite.” During this period,
women’s contributions to harem literature and travel literature “crossed
disciplinary and media divides, with women artists illustrating (and some-
times writing their own) travel accounts.” Research also “repositioned the
stereotype of the isolated harem as a familial and social domain in which
women lived with multigenerational extended family members.”
According to Mary Roberts, Western women’s visits to Ottoman harems,
which resulted “sometimes [in] dressing each other up in each other’s
outfits,” introduced Western women “into the visuality of the harem.
This key element of women’s ethnographic reportage allowed them to
depict themselves as object of the Ottoman women’s gaze.” Lewis notes:
“Corrective attention to women’s fantasy resaturates harem with sexuality
but does not reinscribe male heterosexuality as the definitional norm,”
resulting in “complication of the nature of desire and object choice.” She
concludes that “the harem, and the depiction of the Orientalized woman,
and man, emerge as sources of potential viewer/reader pleasure far beyond
the putative heterosexual male gaze.”

Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing

Issues relating to the harem were first raised in travelers’ accounts, but Billie
Melman argued that “students of British travel writing have contested the
Saidian paradigm and . . . pointed out that travellers’ representations were
not homogenous but were inflected by gender, class and nationality,”28 the
most notable exempla being Lady Wortley Montagu’s Embassy Letters.
Nevertheless, there is no denying that study of travel writing received
a major impulse from Orientalism, “the first work of contemporary criti-
cism to take [it] as a major part of [Orientalism’s] corpus, seeing it as
a body of work which offered particular insight into the operation of
colonial discourses.”29 In “Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing”
(Chapter 10), Ali Behdad states at the outset that “European travelers to the
16 geoffrey p. nash
Middle East produced a substantial body of literature about the region,
describing its geography, people, languages and cultures,” and that these
writings “facilitated the rise of modern Orientalism both as an academic
discipline and as a discourse of power.” His discussion is predicated on the
Saidian notion that “European travelogues constructed the Middle East as
a site of exoticism and thus participated in the production of Euro-
imperialist subjectivity.” Although Behdad allows for the charge frequently
leveled against Orientalism – that it projected a monolithic view that left
“little room for the possibility of difference among the various modes of
representation” – he maintains that, as a “theoretical framework to study
European travel writing by shifting the focus from textuality to historicity
and from the aesthetic to the political,” it remains “indispensable if viewed
as a complex and heterogeneous network of representations that trans-
formed over time.” The French travelogues of the seventeenth century
“created a rich body of knowledge through which emerging European
colonial powers such as France considered their political and economic
relations with the region.” In the same period the foundations of academic
Orientalism were established, notably in the creation of chairs of Oriental
languages in the Collège de France. Nevertheless, in contrast to later
travelers of the eighteenth century who cultivated a spirit of scientific
adventure, the writers of the seventeenth were amateurs in search of the
exotic. While Behdad’s analysis of eighteenth-century travel writings fore-
grounds the emergent positivistic scientific view bent toward categoriza-
tion that amounted to a “discourse of power,” he argues that the earlier
writers “displayed the same kind of binary logic that located the Westerner
in a position of cultural and political superiority . . . The Orient still
remains Europe’s other, but otherness becomes an object of study and
exploration.” In Volney and Savary, travel writing reached a new level,
what Foucault termed the “threshold of scientificity,” which helped under-
write the official discourse of Orientalism employed by figures like Silvestre
Sacy and Ernest Renan. Behdad also revisits the British context in his
remarks on Burton, as well as the “late travelers,” represented here by
Nerval, upon which his earlier revision of Said was constructed. Overall,
then, Behdad’s reading substantially confirms the pioneering connection
first made by Said between travel writing and Orientalism.

Orientalism in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century America

While Said pointed out to his detractors that Orientalism had never been
intended as a comprehensive historical work, there remain areas he did not
Introduction 17
fully take into account but which hold particular significance for some of
the arguments he adduced there. For instance, while post-1950s United
States’ input into the ideological construction of Orientalism plays
a prominent role in the book, Said had little to say about the reception
in nineteenth-century America of Asiatic influences beyond the Islamic
Near East. Mishka Sinha has argued30 that, in centering on the United
States’ post–World War Two replacement of Britain in the Middle East,
Said omitted nineteenth-century American Orientalism and its connec-
tions with German transmission of Sanskrit. This view is given a different
but complementary articulation in David Weir’s “Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century American Orientalism” (Chapter 11). Weir makes
a strong case for Said’s omission of the appeal to the American imaginary
of an Orient further east than the Arab and Iranian Islamicate world.
Beginning with Franklin and Jefferson’s reconnoiter of classic Confucian
Chinese texts, contrary to Said’s semantics – but employing his phrasing –
Weir discerns in their political thinking an initiating stage that allowed for
“a process of refining, reticulating and reconstructing knowledge, which is
precisely what occurred over the next two centuries.” The next stage, “the
early Unitarian phase,” centered on the incorporation, albeit inaccurately,
of Far East religions into the transcendental philosophy of Emerson and
Thoreau. This led to the founding of the American Oriental Society in
1842 and the appointment of a German-trained American philologist to
teach Sankrit at Yale. Interest in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, first in
a theological but later in an aesthetic dimension that engaged T. S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound – the latter in a Japanese context – stretched from the last
quarter of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth. These engage-
ments, alongside other manifestations such as Madame Blavatsky’s
Theosophical Society and P. T. Barnum’s Oriental exhibitions, need to
be offset against “shameful anti-immigration laws specifically targeting
Asians” that suggest a disconnect between a taste for Oriental cultures
and religions on the part of elite Americans and firsthand contact with
Chinese “coolies” constructing railroads. Nonetheless, Weir succeeds in
convincing us that these currents of interest in the East were genuinely
founded and resulted, at least in the case of the Chinese and Japanese
influences on Pound’s poetry, in “one of the most enduring examples of
how Eastern tradition can supplement and validate American culture.” In
T. S. Eliot’s poetry, too, a fusion of East and West is traced in the
contribution of “Indic literature to Eliot’s wisdom voice.” In the post–
Second World War period, Zen Buddhism enjoyed a vogue, and the lifting
of immigration laws led to an influx of Asian immigrants, both factors that,
18 geoffrey p. nash
Weir opines, are likely to impact further on notions of “them” and “us” in
the United States.

Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Postcolonial Critic

Did the all-embracing sway of Orientalism prevent effective ways of
resisting colonial power? Said’s work on Orientalism as a dominant dis-
course and the manner in which power was used to effect misrepresenta-
tion and to block other narratives seemed to imply this. In Culture and
Imperialism, perhaps partly in response to criticism, Said celebrates the
work of resistant entities such as the exiled “Third World” intellectual, but,
while Said endorsed anticolonial writers of the postcolonial period, such as
Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, and promoted the concept of the
literary “voyage in” to the imperial metropolitan center, he is still credited
by some with underestimating the scope of resistance during the colonial
period.31 If he did not produce endorsements of canonical writers such as
Kipling and Conrad, then Said at least presented apologias of their work on
account of their “complexity.” However, Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory, Classes,
Nations, Literatures stages an important criticism of Said’s position as
a proponent of radical deconstruction of power, questioning his role as
a cosmopolitan public intellectual and also his advocacy of modernist
authors, preeminently Joseph Conrad. In “Edward Said and Resistance
in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures” (Chapter 12), Valerie Kennedy
gives a valuable overview of the key role Said has played (albeit unwittingly)
in establishing postcolonial studies, linking in particular his insights on
resistance to the work of postcolonial critics and theorists such as Homi
Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Mary Louise Pratt and Elleke Boehmer and
scrutinizing his influence on postcolonial readings of canonical texts ran-
ging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness to Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso
Sea. Nonetheless, Kennedy concedes that Orientalism “neglects resistance,
homogenizes Orientalist discourse and ignores the role of women in both
Orientalism and imperialism,” opining that “the neglect of resistance in
Orientalism is related to Said’s espousal of Western humanism that takes
white, middle-class, male-authored canonical texts and experiences as its
central point of reference.” In her opinion, Culture and Imperialism retains
a disproportionate focus on canonical works by European authors and
“does not clearly distinguish between European and non-European resis-
tance in the colonial period.” Having earlier drawn attention to Said’s
writings on the Middle East and their insistence on the need for
a Palestinian narrative of resistance, in the last section of her chapter
Introduction 19
Kennedy discusses Said’s ideas “of resistant history” in relation to Fanon’s
Wretched of the Earth, Ngũgı̃’s Decolonizing the Mind and Tayeb Salih’s
Season of Migration to the North.
In “Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism?” (Chapter
13), Andrew C. Long engages in a close, detailed analysis of Said’s readings
of Heart of Darkness and Camus’ L’Étranger. Beginning with Ahmad’s
criticism of Said’s omission or misrepresentation of the work of “Third
World” writers, Long proceeds to reprise Chinua Achebe’s crucial inter-
vention in the Heart of Darkness debate and asks why Said did not join him
in denouncing Conrad’s racism. He tracks Said’s positions in a number of
articles, including “Conrad and Nietzsche,” in which for the first time Said
links “the narrative form of Conrad’s fiction to Africa and empire.” In
Culture and Imperialism, Said’s stance was to offer a “contrapuntal (with
history)” reading of Heart of Darkness in which, perhaps, “the early
aesthetic of distance and irony is the only way” to stop us from concluding
“that the novella is racist propaganda.” Turning to Algeria and L’Étranger,
Long notes Said’s enthusiastic engagement with the struggle for Algerian
independence but also his detached reading of the novel’s Algerian land-
scape as “inseparable from his appeal to universal themes.” Setting Said’s
criticism alongside that of his contemporaries, notably Lionel Trilling and
Clement Greenberg, Long comes to the conclusion that “while Said
recognizes the way racism and colonialism work in Camus’ text, . . . he
does not condemn or denounce the writer.” Said’s criticism of canonical
Western writers like Conrad and Camus, in other words, is brushed by the
politically detached aestheticism found in the criticism of his time: “Said’s
valuation of Joseph Conrad and many other cosmopolitan writers is rooted
in what I call a Cold War cultural critique.” Does this then convict or
absolve him of racism? Long’s answer – both “yes” and “no” – lays down as
markers the terms “irony” and “formal aestheticism” that are interdicted in
discussing both texts in the contemporary classroom, adjudging: “For
postcolonialism, the problem, as with Ahmad’s reading of Said’s literary
criticism, is that the denunciation of racist texts and writers only leads to
a moralizing dead end, which is also, finally, an aestheticization of politics.”

Part III: Application

Part III considers the purchase Said’s conceptualization of Orientalism has
for our reading of literature in the twenty-first century. As will have been
made clear from many of the chapters in this volume, despite being
intermittently pronounced a discontinued product, Edward Said’s
20 geoffrey p. nash
conceptualization of Orientalism continues to remain an important tool of
analysis. His theory continues to hold appeal for literary critics, and he
“remains firmly planted in the field of comparative literature and the
Eurocentric texts that occupy its domain.”32 Twenty-first-century revisions
of Said’s work have opened up possibilities both for extending and for
reframing the scope of Orientalism’s application. Some criticism still
relativizes Orientalism as a stage in postcolonial and postmodern thought
while continuing to argue that Said’s binarism, incorporated in exagger-
ated forms into postcolonial writing, has fed into East/West
confrontationalism.33 Nonetheless, the potential pliability of Said’s
exploration of the term Orientalism has continued to be recognized in
interpretations – even notionally hostile ones – over the last decade or
more. To this might be added a broad interdisciplinary éclat that ranges
from study of Islamic law to Orientalist painting, modern Chinese history
and beyond.34 As Zachary Lockman has put it: “scholars involved in the
study of colonial discourse increasingly came to refine their analyses and
incorporate new elements into them, building on Said’s general approach
but also rendering it more complex, nuanced and concrete in various
ways.”35
In literary studies specifically, Orientalism has continued to feature in
discussions concerning recodifications of the definition and scope of
comparative and world literatures. Placing new conceptualizations of
world literature in a humanist context, Debjani Ganguli proposes that
“literary studies, and for that matter humanities as a whole today need to
look beyond the postcolonial orthodoxies generated by Said’s Orientalism
and parts of Cultural Imperialism that spoke about global impact of
modern European colonialism.”36 A persuasive riposte to this frequently
enounced attitude is mounted by Aamir Mufti, who, in his articulation of
the scope and chronology of world literature, unapologetically valorizes as
he underscores Orientalism’s significance for the discipline. In the opening
sentence to an article published in Critical Inquiry in spring 2010, Mufti
has within his sights a crucial omission from Pascale Casanova’s much-
cited study of comparative literature, The World Republic of Letters: “In the
current revival of the concept of world literature, something of consider-
able importance appears to be largely missing: the question of
Orientalism.”37 According to Mufti, world literature does not supersede
national literatures but arises at the same time as these began to be thought
out. The Orientalist phase that was in full swing at the moment Goethe
confirmed Weltliteratur as a concept coincided with the “initial charting of
non-Western traditions of writing on the emerging map of the literary
Introduction 21
world.” Mufti is critiquing elision of the process whereby – largely thanks
to the colonization of India – the categorization of languages and discovery
of ancient canonical Sanskrit and Persian texts first made the concept of
world literature viable. He goes on to argue that promotion of writers like
Kateb Yacine, V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie as models of “the non-
Western writer,” formed by “the psychology of assimilation into metropo-
litan languages and cultures,” and privileging the cultural change they
represent as “creolization and métissage,” misses the fact
that the deep encounter between English and the other Western languages
and the languages of the global periphery as media of literary expression did
not take place for the first time in the postcolonial era, let alone in the
supposedly transnational transactions of the period of high globalization
but, especially, at the dawn of the modern era itself and fundamentally
transformed both cultural formations involved in the encounter.38

Reapplying Orientalism: Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia

Applications, or reapplications, of Orientalism have been a feature of the
ongoing representation of Muslims within public, most notably media,
discourse following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States
and the subsequent “War on Terror.” In the discourse generated by
members of the Bush administration and the American media to define
and seek out the nation’s enemies, the perpetrators of the attacks, their
accomplices and their supporters, Orientalist or Neo-Orientalist tropes
were very much in evidence, resurfacing in the discourse justifying the
invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Earlier images of Islam employed in the
Western media in response to the Iranian revolution, discussed by Said in
Covering Islam (1981), gained currency during the Rushdie Affair at the end
of the 1980s and after 9/11 morphed into a full-blown confluence of Neo-
Orientalism and Islamophobia.
In “From Orientalism to Islamophobia” (Chapter 14), Mahmut
Mutman argues that Edward Said’s observation, derived from the oil crisis
of 1973 and the Iranian revolution that followed at the end of the decade, of
a new “‘unrestrained and immediate image of Islam, functioning like
a proper name’” can be read as the historical forerunner of today’s
Islamophobia. Said discerned “a new conjuncture in the West’s hegemonic
relationship with the Middle East” founded on the West’s security fears
and loss of control, in which “the old Orientalist image of a distant
despotic, primitive and static religion was imperceptibly recoded into
a new technologically produced image of a violent, oppressive and fanatic
22 geoffrey p. nash
religion that is dangerously too close to the West.” Mutman credits the
Norwegian social anthropologist Dag Henrik Tuastad with isolating the
construction of “Neo-Orientalism” by establishing the correlated images of
“terrorism,” “Arab” and the “Muslim mind” through his study of neocon-
servative writing. Here violence is seen as “‘resulting from traits . . .
embedded in local cultures’” and is encapsulated in the term “new barbar-
ism” given currency by figures such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington
and Daniel Pipes. What connects this new image of Islam, picked up in
Said’s earlier reading, to later ones is the absence of any stated “causal link
between the event it signified and Islam as a religion.” Neo-Orientalism
eventually transforms into the term “Islamophobia” to be observed in the
writing of native informants who, living in the West, and in the name of
the Western concept of freedom, put together the “impartial,” “scientific”
knowledge of the Middle East “expert.” Their “authentic,” “internal”
knowledge contributes to a general consensus on the essentially repressive
nature of Islam, in conformity with the predominant stereotypes in the
Western media. Charting the loose ethico-political conceptualization of
Islamophobia in five major ideas about Muslims (which are reductive and
linked to “internal psychic needs”), Mutman goes on to probe its racist
content in comparison to Negrophobia and anti-Semitism. He concludes
by discussing Tiziana Terranova’s reworking of Said’s concern with the
technological aspects of the new Orientalism, demonstrating “how this real
mutation of Orientalism was introduced by a new technology of power
which depended on publicity, communication management and opinion-
making and corresponded to a new mode of conflict, an information
warfare.”
In “Applications of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia in Recent
Writing” (Chapter 15), Peter Morey also traces a trajectory for a “revived
Orientalism” back to Said’s analysis, pointing out that Neo-Orientalism
and Islamophobia are mobile and have a “political utility,” put to effect in
the War on Terror when it was “necessary to create a ‘spectacle of fear’
around Muslims and Islam to bolster support for an illegal imperialist
foreign policy.” The set of defining Neo-Orientalist tropes sustain a range
of axioms concerning Muslims’ practice: violence, lying, polygamy and
paedophilia, all apparently sustained by their religion. “Muslim culture” is
reified and delimited, disallowing Muslims the opportunity to articulate
ideas outside sanctioned topics and recognized narratives. “The West’s
privilege to define the terms of any discourse about Muslims is . . . at the
heart of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia as hegemonic discourses.”
The assumptions supplied by these are built into a subgenre of popular
Introduction 23
novels and memoirs “by and about Muslim women and their experiences”
that follow a frame story involving the “saving” of Muslim women from
Islamic culture’s victimization. Recent wars – the 1991 Gulf War and the
2001 invasion of Afghanistan – have been sanctioned and fought in their
name. In his analysis of Åsne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, Morey
presents a close reading of a text that “aspires to something more than
journalistic status, employing fictive strategies to bolster claims that are
anthropological in nature,” but concluding that “for all its apparent
objectivity, The Bookseller of Kabul’s deployment of novelistic techniques
takes it beyond the realms of normally accepted journalistic practice.” In
spite of “Seierstad’s urge to tell the truth . . . a conflicted narrative . . . on
one level replicates the cultural prejudices by which Muslim countries are
homogenized and found wanting. Yet, at the same time . . . it exposes as
much about the priorities and opportunism of Westerners as about those in
Afghanistan for whom war has become a permanent state of mind.”
Nonetheless, the book’s Orientalism “remains alive.”

Orientalism in the United States: Migrant Writing

and American Journalism
A further line of thinking about how Orientalism is current and effective in
the twenty-first century requires consideration of what is distinct about
American Orientalism. Has Orientalism seeped into American discourse
(not just Hollywood films)? Does this change from the post–Gulf War
“New World Order” to the “War on Terror” and beyond? Carol
W. N. Fadda, in “Orientalism and Cultural Translation: Middle-Eastern
American Writing” (Chapter 16), proposes the term “anti-Arab racism” as
a fitting descriptor for the way racism has motivated the United States’
essentialization of Arabs and Muslims in its post–Second World War
exercise of imperial power and its military interventions in the Middle
East. The geopolitical shifts resulting from the successive wars and uphea-
vals in that region have been accompanied by “overwhelmingly negative
mainstream representations of Middle Easterners, ones that are premised
on the binary logics of Orientalist discourse.” Outlining the different
phases of arrival of Middle East migrants in America, Fadda emphasizes
how “a mainstream discourse . . . collapsed the distinctions among the
identity markers Muslim, Arab and Middle Eastern, conceiving them as
homogenous and threatening in their enactment of national, cultural,
religious and political difference.” Writers of Middle Eastern ethnicity
have, since the early twentieth century, faced choices as to how to respond
24 geoffrey p. nash
to this crude binary of “an overarching national narrative” that constructs
them in an undifferentiated way as the Other. Though their responses are
far from being uniform, a discernible division exists between those who
have been amenable to satisfying “a Western and Neo-Orientalist public
appetite for stories that affirm the way in which it imagines and constructs
the Muslim and Middle-Eastern Other” and others who, from the 1990s,
displayed a “shift toward different forms of anti-Orientalist Arab American
self-representation.” Among the latter group, Mohja Kahf, Suheir
Hammad and other Arab American writers enact “the replacement of
rigid Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist boundaries with fluid identity for-
mations and transnational configurations of belonging.”
In “New Orientalism and the American Media: New York Cleopatra
and Saudi ‘Giggly Black Ghosts’” (Chapter 17), Moneera Al-Ghadeer sets
out to “explore the digital assembly initiated by Saudi women and their
microblogging attempt to destabilize two critical concepts that are impor-
tant subjects of investigation for this volume – American Orientalism and
new Orientalism in social media.” Her cue is the “invented Orient” Said
presents at the start of Orientalism – “the Orient of Chateaubriand and
Nerval” – the disappearance of which was announced by a French journal-
ist witnessing the destruction of Beirut in the civil war of 1975–1976. “As we
shall see, a similar fictional Orient persists in the representations of the
American media, indicating not only that the West and the East are
interdependent but that the fictionality of the Western view of ‘the
Orient’ emerges from tragic events that command lamentation and appro-
priation.” Turning to the representation of Saudi women in the US press,
Al-Ghadeer observes that “the Saudi woman has become a protagonist
whose narrative has almost identical discursive characteristics to those
found in media stories about Arab and Muslim women.” From her
investigation of editorials, which range from September 11, 2001, to spring
2017, the representation appears little changed: “What characterizes most
of these editorials are the inextricable links between Saudi women, oil,
premodernization, the Arab Spring and Western moralism. These values
become the yardstick against which Saudi women are asymmetrically
measured . . . The attempted unveiling of Arab women, developed during
the period of high imperialism and its Orientalist discourse, recurs time
and again in recent writing and reporting about Saudi women.” Hence the
encapsulation of Saudi women by a New York Times journalist visiting the
kingdom as “‘giggly black ghosts’ . . . ‘enveloped in black.’” Al-Ghadeer’s
subject, which is about the engagement of Saudi women in non-Western
feminist activity and how this has shifted into cyberspace to “digital
Introduction 25
activism,” is underpinned by the question “Do the twentieth-century
Orientalist images of Arab women migrate to cyberspace, and, if they do,
are they presented and viewed differently there than they are in print
media?” Her conclusion – that they do, and they are not – presents “a
challenge not only to postcolonial and gender studies but also to our
understanding of global communication and comparative cultural debates
in general.”

Marxism, Post-Marxism and (Post-)Orientalism

Another area that is worth examining is the relationship between Said and
those Marxist intellectual interlocutors who are related not only to Said’s
borrowings but also to the intellectual breadth and veracity of Orientalism
as a concept and phenomenon. A fuller exploration of the topic might
probe such issues as: Is Orientalism an ideology or more? How does Said’s
conception of power and culture differ from the kind presented by
Marxist materialism? Did Said expand the cultural range of the concept?
Although these questions are not addressed here, we confirm how, at least
at an early stage, Said’s perspectives on Orientalism appear to have over-
lapped with Marxists’. His distinction and innovation lies (whether
one agrees with him or not) where he departs from them. Anouar Abdel-
Malek’s seminal article “Orientalism in Crisis” and Maxime Rodinson’s
work leading up to his Europe and the Mystique of Islam helped shape Said’s
writings on the topic of Orientalism.39 Later, however, criticisms were
leveled against Said from Marxist standpoints, beginning with Sadik al-
‘Azm’s response to Orientalism and his proposal of an “Orientalism in
reverse.”40 Like al-‘Azm, who vehemently rejected Said’s charge that Marx
had been suborned by Orientalist thinking about Asia, Gilbert Achcar has
summed up Said’s debt to Abdel-Malik and Rodinson as thinkers who
shared his anticolonial/anti-imperialist standpoint but who were “particu-
larly irritated by [his] indiscriminate classification of Marx as an
‘Orientalist’ in the pejorative sense, in full disregard of the fact that most
anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the twentieth century were
inspired by Marx’s legacy.”41 (Al-‘Azm rejected Said’s portrayal of Marx in
this way as a “travesty”; interestingly, he blames this partly on Said’s
“excessive fascination with the verbal, textual and linguistic.”)42 Achar
opines that having condemned Hegel’s sophisticated rehearsal of the
clichés of Orientalism, Said’s own definition of the Orient and the West
was, to say the least, essentialist in its view of culture43 and, we might add,
guilty of mystification in its analysis of power. Such arguments amount to
26 geoffrey p. nash
a Marxian view that Orientalism was, at base, a substitution of abstract
verbal categories for Marxist diagnosis of colonialism fueled by economic
and class exploitation, requiring for their removal revolutionary action.
Aijaz Ahmad, as we have already observed, charged Said with having
disabled anticolonial resistance as well as critiquing his stance as
a postcolonial intellectual. He also argued that Said had helped “refurbish,
in those aspects of Social Science which overlap with History, quite
conservative, rightwing versions of a certain kind of indigenism under
the label of authenticity and agency of the Third World historical sub-
ject.”44 This could be construed as constituting part of a larger argument
which Ahmad conducted against “Third Worldism” and postcolonial
theorists (notably Bhabha) “who believe not only that colonialism has
more or less ended but who also subscribe to the idea of the end of
Marxism, nationalism, collective historical subjects and revolutionary pos-
sibility as such.”45
In the last chapters of this volume, two theorists chart the trajectory
Orientalism might take in the future, both with Marxist/post-Marxist
frames in the background. One academic who has moved away from
revision and partial endorsement of Edward Said is Anouar Majid. In
“On Orientalism’s Future(s)” (Chapter 18), apparently relinquishing
entirely his own former postcolonial stance and extending his criticisms
of Islamism and Arab nationalism, Majid stages a wholesale denunciation
of Orientalism for the encouragement it has extended to proponents of
these movements. He also condemns those Western academics who either
have endorsed Said or engage in recuperation of Islam as “unwitting
collaborators of a religion that has stifled freedoms, delayed emancipation
and inflicted incalculable damage on the Muslims who are trapped in
Muslim-majority societies.” The “theory of protest” Muslims have derived
from Said’s work has added to their “sense of helplessness and, what’s
worse, allowed liberal and progressive scholars from both sides to come to
their rescue, armed by a sophisticated language that allowed for little
nuance and almost no genuine progressive critical thinking.”
Contending that the West’s study of Islam “has enriched us immensely,”
Majid argues that one effect of Said’s theory has been “the perpetuation of
failure and its nagging consequences on the Muslim side, and the trans-
formation of entire academic fields into hagiographic tributes to
a forgotten Muslim past.” The problem now is “what to do with Said’s
theory as we try to act on an unstable present and decipher the outlines of
an elusive future.” The suggested solution for “those of us who want to see
Muslims be more active participants in the making of a better civilization,
Introduction 27
not chronic complainers about the ills (real and imagined) that continue to
befall them, [is] to shelve Said’s theory and move on to newer and bolder
paradigms.”
In “‘The Engine of Survival’: A Future for Orientalism” (Chapter 19),
Patrick Williams joins debate with Majid, taking issue with Majid’s charge
that Said has given ammunition to Muslim religio-cultural revanchism:
At the risk of stating the very obvious, Orientalism was not written in
support of Islam, nor to portray Muslims as victims, nor to encourage
victim mentalities on the part of anyone. Said is not pro-Islam as such; he
is anti-misrepresentation and anti-oppression, whatever the culture, com-
munity or religion being subjected to them. He is not putting forward
a simplistic model of the (wicked) West endlessly oppressing the (down-
trodden) East.

Muslims’ sense of victimization goes back long before Said and so “is not
logically attributable to Said’s influence.” Moreover, Said “did not regard
Orientalism as a theory as such, and ‘protest’ was not the aim.” As to the
end of establishing the future utility or otherwise of Orientalism, Williams’
response is: “It has a guaranteed future in the context of Said’s oeuvre, its
foundational analysis of modes of domination complemented by – among
so many others – Culture and Imperialism’s focus on indigenous resistance
and Covering Islam’s analysis of media coverage of Islamic religion and
culture, carrying forward the range of Saidian concerns and contestations.”
In an earlier work, Majid took Said to task for continuing to think along
the lines of Western humanism.46 Williams’ chapter, however, ends by
foregrounding Said’s humanism; if his “last words” on Orientalism appear
in the preface to the 2003 reprinting, his last book, Humanism and
Democratic Criticism, which he completed before his death, “embodies
the future of Orientalism, carrying its humanist impulse and analysis
forward a quarter of a century.” For Hamid Dabashi, however, Said’s
humanism was always an aberration – flagged up early on as a weak facet
of Orientalism present due to his attempt to marry “assymetrically” the
poststructuralism of Foucault with the humanist tradition of Auerbach and
Western literature.47 Williams, who shows in the second paragraph of his
chapter that he is well aware of this, would no doubt assign Dabashi’s book
Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror to the “scramble
to critique Orientalism, to correct it or ‘go beyond’ it”. Dabashi, however,
celebrates Said’s brilliance as a literature professor who was short on
awareness of the sociology of knowledge but was the beneficiary of
“Marx, Engels, Scheler and Mannheim [who] demonstrated the
28 geoffrey p. nash
foundational production of the very a priori structure of thinking, at a deep
epistemic level, before even a producer of knowledge has put pen to
paper.”48 In a manner of speaking, the circle is squared. Majid, Williams
and Dabashi each invoke Marx’s influence on Said in a broadly similar
way. Each of them admits Orientalism’s power of address – their differ-
ences reside in the valence they attach to its message and the importance
they ascribe to its legacy.

Notes
1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 2–3; original italics. Said divided
Orientalism into three interlocking constituents: the study of the Orient as
an academic discipline; a style of thought based upon an ontological and
epistemological distinction between “the Orient” and “the Occident”; and
“the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient, making statements
about it, describing it [and] ruling over it” (pp. 2–3).
2. Said, Afterword to the 1995 printing, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995),
p. 331.
3. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 88.
4. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 3–4, p. 8.
5. See Lisa Lampert-Weissig, ed., Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 11–15.
6. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols of the East: European Representations of Islam
1100–1450 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), p. 5, p. 9.
7. Claire Gallien and Olivera Jokic, “Eighteenth-Century Orientalism in
Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism,” Literary
Compass 12:4 (2015): pp. 121–133, p. 121.
8. Suvir Kaul, Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 8.
9. Srinivas Avaramudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the
Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 11.
10. Avaramudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 3.
11. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 364. Jeffrey Cass re-enforces
the paradox whereby “the project of Orientalism . . . begins in the late
eighteenth century and represents the West’s simultaneous yearning for
and love of Eastern exoticism at the same time that it conquers and
subdues Eastern lands in order to control, manage, and contain them.”
“Interrogating Orientalism: Theories and Practices,” in Interrogating
Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogical Practices, eds. Diane
Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2006), pp. 25–45, p. 41.
Introduction 29
12. Gallien and Jokic, “Eighteenth-Century Orientalism,” p. 121.
13. Avaramudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 8; Ballaster, Fabulous
Orients, p. 14.
14. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London:
Verso, 1997), p. 44; Said’s statement in Orientalism was: “European culture
gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort
of surrogate and underground self” (p. 3).
15. Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2007), p. 65.
16. Kaul, Eighteenth-Century British Literature, p. 3.
17. See Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and
Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
18. See Urs Alp, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. xii.
19. See Eitan Bar-Jousef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine
and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
20. In their introduction to Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham, MA:
Brandeis University Press, 2005), Ivan Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar
argue for a broadening of Orientalism to include Jews, recognizing that
they “as well as Muslims had been the target of orientalism” (p. xv). See
also Ivan Kalmar, “Arabizing the Bible: Racial Supersessionism in
Nineteenth Century Christian Art and Biblical Criticism,” in
Orientalism Revisited, ed. Ian Netton (London: Routledge, 2012), pp.
176–186.
21. Hoeveler and Cass, Interrogating Orientalism, p. 11.
22. Varisco, Reading Orientalism, p. 81.
23. One of the main arguments made by Aijaz Ahmad; see In Theory: Classes,
Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992).
24. Peter Childs and Patrick R. J. Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial
Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997),
p. 122.
25. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993). For
criticism of Bhabha, see Alex Callinicos, “Wonders Taken For Signs,” in Post-
Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism, eds. M. Zavarzadeh and D. Morton
(Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1995), pp. 98–112. Moore-Gilbert,
Postcolonial Theory, quotes approvingly (p. 147) Abdul JanMohamed’s con-
clusion: Bhabha “circumvent[s] entirely the dense history of the material
conflict between Europeans and natives . . . to focus on colonial discourse as
if it existed in a vacuum.” See also Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies:
A Materialist Critique (New York: Routledge, 2004). However, in Colonial
Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995),
Robert J. C. Young effectively applies hybridity in discussing racism and the
desire of the colonizer for the colonized other. The work of Ann Laura Stoler
extends this in her examinations of white-colonized miscegenation in colonial
society: Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in
30 geoffrey p. nash
Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Along the
Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
26. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1991).
27. Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and
Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1991); Billie Melman, Women’s Orients:
English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race,
Femininity and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1996);
Meyda Yeǧ enoǧ lu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of
Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
28. Billie Melman, “The Middle East/Arabia: ‘The Cradle of Islam,’” in The
Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 105–121, p. 107. This
approach is embodied in Ali Behdad’s seminal study of Middle East travel
writing, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). See also Behdad’s
“Orientalism,” in Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia, ed.
Jennifer Speake, 3 vols. (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn), 2: pp. 888–891.
29. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 8.
30. Mishka Sinha, “Orienting America: Sansrit and Modern Scholarship in the
United States,” in Debating Orientalism, eds. Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard
and David Attwell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 73–93.
31. Moore-Gilbert (Postcolonial Theory, p. 51) proposed “the pessimistic
Foucauldian in Said leads him at times to propose a model of colonial political
relations in which all power lies with the colonizer.”
32. Jeffrey Cass, “Interrogating Orientalism: Theories and Practices,” in Hoeveler
and Cass, Interrogating Orientalism, pp. 25–45, p. 27. This chapter is one of
the more comprehensive and succinct surveys of the interdisciplinary scope of
Orientalism.
33. This is one of the arguments leveled against Said by Daniel Varisco in Reading
Orientalism.
34. These topics and a range of other areas related to Orientalism are included in
François Pouillon and Jean-Claude Vatin, eds., After Orientalism: Critical
Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Re-appropriations (Leiden: Brill,
2015). A collection of essays, many of which have Francophone origins, this
includes pieces by the editors and Robert Irwin that are openly antagonistic to
Said. Nonetheless, others, specifically two on Late Ottoman and Kemalist
politics by Edhem Eldem and Emmanuel Szurek, follow the important seam
of Ottoman Orientalism and apply new applications of “self-orientalizing,”
“internal,” “mimetic,” and “vernacular” Orientalism. Other notable explora-
tions of Saidian-influenced topics are Elena Andreeva, Russia and Iran in the
Great Game: Travelogues and Orientalism (London: Routledge, 2007), and
Introduction 31
Stephanie Cronin, ed., Iranian-Russian Encounters (London: Routledge,
2013). On Robert Irwin’s (and Martin Kramer and Ibn Warraq’s) attacks on
Said, see Robert Spencer, “The ‘War on Terror’ and the Backlash against
Orientalism,” in Debating Orientalism, eds. Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard
and David Attwell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 155–174.
35. Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and
Politics of Orientalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010), p. 207.
36. Debjani Ganguli and Ned Curthoys, eds., Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public
Intellectual (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), p. 179.
37. Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literature,”
Critical Inquiry 36:3 (Spring 2010): pp. 458–493, p. 458.
38. Mufti, “Orientalism,” pp. 460–461. More recently, Mufti has confirmed his
view that Orientalism is “the genealogical origin of world literature” and
challenges those behind its recent Eurocentric encodements for missing
colonialism’s continuing imprint on non-Western literatures: “The historical
experience of being colonized – that is, the transition to capitalism and bour-
geois modernity under the conditions of colonial subjugation – introduces
historical disruptions that cannot be subsumed in a narrative of continuous
historical development, as is possible in metropolitan societies – hence the
specific forms that the crisis of authenticity (the desire for a return and
restoration to an origin) takes in postcolonial societies.” Aamir R. Mufti,
Forget English: Orientalism and World Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2016), p. 30, p. 47.
39. Anouar Abdel-Malik, “Orientalism in Crisis,” Diogenes 44 (1963): pp. 104–12;
repr. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press), pp. 47–56; Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, trans.
R. Veinus (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), originally published as La fascination
de l’Islam (1980); see also Maxime Rodinson, “The Western Image and
Western Studies of Islam,” in The Legacy of Islam, 2nd ed., eds.
Joseph Schacht and C. E. Bosworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974),
pp. 9–62.
40. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin 8
(1991): pp. 5–26; repr. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader, pp. 217–238.
41. Gilbert Achcar, Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (London: Saqi, 2013),
p. 71. Achcar goes on to argue that al-‘Azm, Samir Amin and Aijaz Ahmad “all
reproached [Said] for adhering to a construction of the West that postulates
a continuity from Ancient Greece to the present-day United States, and for
positing that true knowledge of the Orient is beyond the reach of Western
minds, thus pandering to Oriental ethnocentrisms and their own mythical
representations of their communities” (pp. 81–82). On a different issue, it
might be argued that Said’s inclusion of Gramsci in Culture and Imperialism
extends the role of culture beyond the base/superstructure model of classical
Marxism. Moore-Gilbert pointed out in that work Said’s employment of the
Marxist historiography of Eric Hobsbawm and V. G. Kiernan, and his praise
32 geoffrey p. nash
of Raymond William’s work on culture, although he “chides [him] . . . for
a failure to attend to issues of imperialism” (p. 71).
42. Al-‘Azm, “Orientalism,” p. 226.
43. Achar, Marxism, Orientalism, p. 76.
44. Aijaz Ahmad, “Between Orientalism and Historicism,” Studies in History 7:1
(1991), sections 2–5; repr. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader, pp. 286–297,
p. 296.
45. Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” Race & Class 36:3
(1995): pp. 1–20, pp. 9–10. Neil Lazarus endorses Ahmad’s argument: “It is
clear that in Bhabha’s thinking ‘postcolonial’ has ceased to be a historical
category. The term does not designate what it sounds like it designates: that is,
the moment, or more generally the time, after colonialism” (original italics).
Even in Said, in Culture and Imperialism, “we can already observe the
tendency to cast imperialism as pre-eminently a political dispensation and
to refer it, in civilizational terms, to ‘the west’, rather than to the specific
dynamics of capitalist development.” Lazarus, “‘Third Worldism’ and the
Political Imaginary of Postcolonial Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), pp. 324–339, p. 329, p. 333.
46. See Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric
World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
47. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, p. 41.
48. Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015), p. 97.
part 1
Origins
chapter 1

Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century

Suvir Kaul

Orientalism was, and in modiﬁed ways continues to be, a capacious, supple

and changing discursive system that enables Anglo-European writers to
explain and to manage the encounters between themselves and the peoples
of lands ranging from Turkey, Egypt, Persia and India to China and Japan.
Since these peoples, their lives, their manufactures and their worldviews
were so different from each other (as in fact were the different Westerners
who engaged them), we must begin by recognizing that Orientalism is a
discourse of singular power, one that manufactures an “Orient” even as it
brings different peoples into view. Historically, Orientalism developed the
capacity to enumerate (sometimes sympathetically or admiringly) cultural
particularities even as it reshaped its observations into moral-political
systems of classification that privilege Western self-definition. Further, it
is important to note that Orientalism both draws its world-making power
from, and in turn enables, the rise of modern European empires.
Orientalism is not identical with the racist apologetics of high imperialism,
but these coterminous languages of power do share many rhetorical fea-
tures and styles of address (it is possible to argue that the former made
possible the latter). One last detail: as a discursive system, Orientalism is far
from being the product of disinterested intellectual enquiries into the
religious practices, social systems or economic organization of “Oriental”
peoples. Rather, its characteristic flourishes, its hyperbole and its repres-
sions, can be traced back to the libidinal and affective energies, the irra-
tional fears and desires, of Westerners as they came into contact with
unfamiliar commodities, bodies and cultural forms.1
Commentators have endowed Orientalism with a long prehistory or
genealogy: Edward Said finds Orientalist tropes in Herodotus’ historio-
graphy and his accounts of Alexander’s conquests. Others, narrowing their
focus to scholarship, have pointed to theologians who studied Hebrew,
Aramaic and Syriac – the early languages of the Bible – as precursors.2
From antiquity onward, as armies moved in conquest across vast
35
36 suvir kaul
territories, as commercial routes developed across land and water, as stories
traveled and mutated across languages, commentators sought to make
sense of cultural and socioeconomic differences, and their curiosity was
often respectful. However, whenever such cultural examination was pre-
cipitated by the violence of conquest and control, the discourses within
which difference was catalogued and explained became partisan and self-
serving; in effect they produced the difference they claimed only to perceive.
Such writing played a formative role in cultural self-definition, particularly
once systems of religious belief were ranged against each other. The need to
confirm “Occidental” difference from “Oriental” lives often centered on
the need to set Christians off from Muslims (and, as the example of Biblical
scholarship suggests, from Jews, both those living in Europe and else-
where).3 Then, in the early modern period, as the contact zones of
European empires expanded, a putatively Christian Europe sought to
demarcate its civilizational difference not just from monotheistic Jews or
Muslims but also from belief systems practiced across Asia, particularly in
India, China, Japan and the “Spice Islands” of the Moluccas.
However, the long histories of travel and trade complicated this political
and cultural need to catalogue difference. Indeed, the border-crossing
powers of tales, ideas and intellectual traditions (including scientific
knowledge, philosophical systems and aesthetics) worked against the
grain of such polarized differentiation. Not that people and practices
were the same everywhere, but there was no easy way to believe in the
lesser status of others if you were drinking from vessels they had molded, or
eating food made palatable by spices from their lands, or drinking teas they
had grown, or wearing fabrics they had woven, or being entertained by
stories that they had told about themselves, particularly as they involved
fabulous wealth and power. By the eighteenth century, however, European
Orientalism comes into visibility as an increasingly consolidated attitude, a
mode of address and understanding that helps manage the percolation of
the foreign into the domestic and shapes the responses of travelers,
traders and colonists overseas. A variety of desires – commercial, sexual,
intellectual – had clearly been activated by experiences in and fantasies
about the “Orient.” Courts like those of the Ottomans, the Mughals, the
Ming and Qing emperors, and the Edo and Tokugawa shogunate excited
fear and covetousness, and over time, as European trading posts became
the staging points for territorial acquisition, particularly in India,
Orientalism morphed from a discourse of envy and wonder into one of
political-bureaucratic, cultural and moral superiority. European “moder-
nity” was increasingly contrasted with decaying traditionalism, and that
Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century 37
divergence became both the excuse for and the explanation of military
gains made by European colonists and traders. Over the next century and
more, as European empires consolidated their control over vast territories,
apologists for imperialism insisted upon the civilizational mandate behind,
and the historical inevitability of, European rule over the lesser peoples of
the earth.
This chapter will focus on the British experience of “Oriental” things,
ideas and peoples over the course of the eighteenth century in order to
illustrate the widespread impact of such material and cultural phenomena
on the making of British (and, by extension, western European) values and
lifestyles. We can turn first to the growing presence of imported commod-
ities, which followed from the expansion of the trading activities of the
East India Company. The EIC’s success enabled wealthy Englishmen and
-women to aspire to the fashionable lives enjoyed by their Portuguese,
Dutch and French counterparts. The volume of imports was soon large
enough to initiate a broader consumer culture. From the late seventeenth
century onward, china and porcelain; lacquered goods from Japan; cotton
fabrics from India; silk from China; and tea, coffee and sugar remade the
lives of the rich as well as of the bourgeoisie.4 These goods flooded into
homes but also into literary texts, where their presence in British lives is
usually treated with some degree of cultural and moral suspicion, as
evidence of conspicuous consumption that disturbs settled economic and
social hierarchies. This, for instance, is Anne Finch, Countess of
Winchilsea, complaining about the fashionable ways of the wife of a
successful merchant:
A Dutchess wears not so much Gold and Lace;
Then ’tis with Her an undisputed Case,
The finest Petticoat must take the Place.
Her Rooms, anew at ev’ry Christ’ning drest,
Put down the Court, and vex the City-Guest.
Grinning Malottos in true Ermin stare;
The best Japan, and clearest China Ware
Are but as common Delft and English Laquar there.5
The merchant’s wife dresses above her station, changes the decor in her
rooms each year, surrounds herself with black servants wearing royal
ermine and – this is the climax of this complaint – has as much Japanese
lacquer-work and Chinese porcelain in her house as others have Dutch
ceramics from Delft (“delftware”) or imitation lacquer-work (termed
“japanning”) manufactured locally. When asked, the merchant claims his
38 suvir kaul
wealth is the result of his industry and financial acumen. This is the point
at which satire turns into moral fable: all the merchant’s ventures overseas
fail (he blames providence), and he flees to the country, leaving behind his
wife and debts.
The link between a woman’s vanity, sexuality and china is a recurrent
trope in early eighteenth-century poetry. The male speaker in John Gay’s
“To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China” (1725) is inflamed by desire for
Laura, a woman who has eyes only for china: “China’s the passion of her
soul; / A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl, / Can kindle wishes in her breast, /
Inflame with joy, or break her rest” (ll. 7–10). Unable to gain her attention,
the speaker muses that women are in fact a type of chinaware: “Are they not
valu’d for their beauty, / Too fair, too fine for houshold duty?” (ll. 33–34).
This seeming compliment is but a prelude to a more vindictive observation,
one which sexualizes this analogy between women and porcelain: “How
white, how polish’d is their skin, / And valu’d most when only seen! / She
who before was highest priz’d, / Is for a crack or flaw despis’d” (ll. 37–40).
The connection between collectibles and femininity is reiterated in the
conclusion of the poem; now the speaker reminds Laura that unlike china,
more valuable as it ages, she must seize the day:
Love, Laura, love, while youth is warm,
For each new winter breaks a charm;
And woman’s not like China sold,
But cheaper grows in growing old;
Then quickly chuse the prudent part,
Or else you break a faithful heart. (ll. 67–72)
These two examples make clear that imported Chinese wares (to take just
one set of “Oriental” commodities) became an iconic marker of social life,
of class behavior and of gender difference in Britain. Christian moralists
had long castigated overconsumption, but that history alone does not
adequately explain why imports such as cotton and silk fabrics, tea and
coffee, now central to the cultivation and display of refined manners in
domestic and public spaces, were both desired and suspect. As foreign
material objects circulated into British lives, they crystallized awareness of
both the benefits of and the costs and consequences of overseas trade. All of
these materials were sourced from well-established trade networks in Asia,
often in violent competition with other European or local merchants. The
consumption of tobacco, sugar and rum was inescapably tainted by the
horrors of the slave trade and of plantation slavery;6 while imports from
Asia did not carry such an obvious moral burden, they did precipitate
Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century 39
recurrent diatribes against consumption and luxury that suggest more than
moral unease. They were, after all, sources of great pleasure, pleasure that
had to be managed, particularly by deflecting its potential immorality onto
avaricious women and uncultured social climbers.
As Anne Finch’s complaint makes clear, there was also a widening
awareness that overseas commerce was enriching a new class of non-
aristocratic, non-landed gentry and granting port cities, particularly
London, disproportionate importance in setting national agendas. Much
was changing as this consumer culture developed. Imports clearly had the
power to reshape normative ideas of selfhood and social order, not only as
material objects but also because they were seen to embody some of the
cultural and social values of the worlds from which they originated.
Whether they came from China, India, the West Indies or elsewhere,
they were part of a flood of prose that described those places and their
peoples and invited Britons to think comparatively about social mores and
beliefs. Robert Markley argues that “lure of trade to the Far East continued
to dominate conceptions of international commerce”; he turns to the
revised and enlarged volume of John Harris’ Navigantium atque
Itinerantium Biblioteca (1745) to show that well “into the eighteenth
century, atlases, geographies, collections, and compilations devoted far
more space to Asia than to the Americas.”7 In the instance of chinoiserie,
then, English responses were part of a broader series of meditations on
China – in Chi-ming Yang’s fetching phrase, “the dual register of china
and China” enables economic and moral, social and spiritual compari-
sons.8 As David Porter and other scholars have shown, there was much that
was admired about China – the antiquity of its civilization, the orderliness
of its administration, its commercial productivity – but also much that was
feared, including its civilizational self-confidence, its wealth, its indiffer-
ence to goods from the West, and its refusal to open up markets on terms
favorable to Westerners.9
Yang reminds us of the work of recent economic historians who confirm
that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “China was the predomi-
nant force of the early modern global economy” and that before the “so-
called rise of the West, it already possessed what are generally considered
the conditions of modernity: a developed state formation, advanced mar-
ket system, government bureaucracy, and high standards of living relative
to other parts of the world” (pp. 5–6). Seventeenth-century Dutch and
Jesuit reports, however ambivalent they might have been about other
elements of Chinese life, had made clear that, as Robert Batchelor puts
it, China was “a populous, urbanized, commercial society with strong
40 suvir kaul
institutions devoted to the cultural replication of merit” and that “China
had developed the most well-governed, mannered, and stable nation on
earth, grounded upon … an ancient and good ‘constitution’.” Thus,
Batchelor argues, both Old Whigs and post-1688 Tories imagined China
less as a “commercial competitor” than as “an exemplary model of stability
for an emerging commercial society like Britain.”10 China was also not an
immediate political threat, which allowed observers some evaluative dis-
tance. The model of political and social continuity they projected onto
China was particularly attractive for British commentators, for it offered
epistemological comforts too.
Porter shows that Edward Gibbon turned to China as “a place … where
the myriad signs and symbols that constitute culture were reliably
grounded in a fixed, originary source of meaning and therefore not subject
to the corrupting vicissitudes of common language and history” (p. 6).
Bureaucrat-scholars – mandarins – guaranteed civic virtues over great
stretches of time, and lineages of rule protected against unsettling chal-
lenges to authority, making China exemplary for anyone worried about the
rise and fall of empires. However, as European nations grew more success-
ful in their trading and colonial ventures, Porter notes an overall shift in the
European response to China, which “gradually evolved from one of
reverential awe to one of increasingly dismissive contempt” (p. 7).
The example of China shows how the “Orient” was admired and envied,
but also provincialized, during this period; this complex of responses
defines discourses of Orientalism before the events discussed in Said’s
Orientalism. Said’s analysis, centered as it is in the nineteenth century, is
also borne out – not wholly or identically of course, but substantially – by
the evidence offered by earlier literary, philosophical and political writing.
Eighteenth-century texts provide a resonant archive in which to study the
multiple and overlapping material, cultural and ideological processes that
we understand today as colonial discourse or the language of empire. In its
variegated forms, Orientalism was a subset of this language, even when
Britain was not in a position of superiority, as the instance of China makes
clear.11 As Great Britain globalized itself in this century – it lost an empire
to its west and gained another in the east – the contact zones of trade and
colonialism demanded supple forms of representation, whose characteristic
vocabularies define for us the interwoven strands of Orientalism.
The European fascination with, and fear and envy of, Muslim empires
like Turkey, Persia and Mughal India resulted in the development of
another weighty and enduring form of Orientalist engagement, replete
with characteristic rhetorical flourishes.12 Alain Grosrichard’s witty
Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century 41
comment reminds us of the hyperbolic terms in which Ottoman rule, for
instance, was imagined: “From the end of the seventeenth century and all
through the eighteenth, a spectre was haunting Europe: the spectre of
despotism.”13 As Grosrichard shows, a variety of European thinkers and
travel writers turned away from their own feudal and imperial histories and
contemporary practices, their gaze hypnotized by the wealth and suppo-
sedly absolute power of the Turkish sultan (as well as by the threat that
Ottoman military and naval power represented). In their telling, despotism
did not designate a mode of rule or political practice alone but named a
cultural and social form, one that demarcated civilizational deficiencies:
Asia was home to slavish subjects, to peoples who had not yet ascended to
political rationality or being, and hence was the playground of despotic
power. Further, speculation about the form and management of the
seraglio or harem – spaces closed off to the male gaze – fueled fantasies
of both manifold aberrant sexualities and the consolidation of power in the
hands of the eunuch-administrators who ruled in the name of the Sultan.14
In effect, Grosrichard argues, writers like Montesquieu and Voltaire who
turned to “the regimes of Asia” wished to “draw analogies with the actual
state of monarchies” at home; for him, any such writing is in practice an
“endoscopic fantasy” (p. 23).
There were other modes of fantasy in circulation too that originated not
in the European imagination but in the literatures and folktales of India,
Persia and the Arab lands. European writers found in the Alf layla wa layla
(Thousand and One Nights) a suggestive form of nested storytelling as well
as a remarkably fecund collection of stories. As Saree Makdisi and Felicity
Nussbaum argue, this story-cycle, first translated into French by Antoine
Galland as Les mille et une nuits (1704–1717) and subsequently into a dozen
European languages, “offered a particularly powerful vision of an Asiatic
culture seemingly saturated with references to sensuality, extravagance,
indulgence, violence, supernaturalism, and eroticism: the very things that
the rising European powers were – for all their own obsessive interest in
them – keen to disavow as elements in their own cultures as they sought to
find ways to justify their conquest and rule over other peoples, particularly
in Asia.”15 Makdisi and Nussbaum are clear about the importance of these
traveling tales in fueling the European imagination: “English and French
literature from the early to mid-eighteenth century onwards would not
have taken the shape it did had it not been for the Nights” (p. 12). In
England, the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage in England was, as
Bridget Orr states, “in fact notable for its large number of serious dramas
with exotic, mostly Asian subjects.”16 Orr also argues that adaptations from
42 suvir kaul
Galland’s Nights aided the efflorescence of Oriental “shows” exemplified in
the popularity of pantomime, melodrama, burletta, spectacle and romance
(p. 104). These shows continued to be popular even though theater critics
belittled such performances and argued that they tarnished serious drama.
Forms of storytelling such as the Oriental fable too found ready audi-
ences and were crucial to the rise and cultural dominance of the novel.17
Recent critics have shown convincingly that the vastly influential “rise of
the novel” thesis developed by Ian Watt worked to render parochial
novelistic practices that were in fact much more cosmopolitan in their
historical and formal origins as well as themes and concerns.18 In fact,
Srinivas Aravamudan has argued that paying attention to such cosmopo-
litanism will allow us to distinguish a cultural possibility in Enlightenment
thought whose curiosity and indeed “utopian aspirations” were blunted by
the materialist and political requirements of empire. For him, the forms of
early prose fiction in England or France suggest a different relation
between them and their Orients. He writes that the very popular
“Oriental tales, pseudoethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political uto-
pias speculated about a largely imaginative East” and that this “imagination
was experimental, prospective, and antifoundationalist.” However, such
“experimentation came to an end … partly out of generic exhaustion and
partly as a result of a rising nationalist tide that combined self-contempla-
tive narcissism with intense xenophobia.”19 Traveling tales were (or are) of
course no guarantee against ethnocentric conclusions, but they do open up
at least the possibility of thinking outside the narrow certainties of nation-
alist and domestic ideology.
For another instance of the possibilities of experience, imagination and
literary innovation opened up by the “East,” let us turn to the cultural work
of British men abroad, particularly after 1757, when the merchants of the
East India Company became the de facto rulers of territories in India.
William Jones, an administrator and judge with the Company in Bengal,
who was learned in languages both European and Indian, a remarkable
linguist and philologist and a scholar of ancient India – in sum, an
exemplary Orientalist – also wrote poetry. Jones had translated poems
from Sanskrit and Persian, and his empathetic immersion into those poetic
forms and figures is visible in his own writing. Nandini Das has noted that
Jones attempted to “rejuvenate the tired imagery of eighteenth-century
poetry with the help of the ‘poetry of the Eastern nations’”;20 Jones’ “A
Hymn to Camdeo” (written in 1784) is a good instance. Jones found in
Sanskrit celebrations of the powers of Kamdev, the Hindu god of love and
eros, “new and peculiar beauties.” “A Hymn to Camdeo” is enlivened by
Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century 43
such novel figures and images, but their beauties are not the only impact
Sanskrit poetics had on Jones. His invocation of Camdeo moves the poet
into states of being and feeling that disrupt all manner of confessional,
experiential, cultural, racial and colonial divides. A senior official of the
East India Company worships a Hindu divinity and models an exaltation
of spirit: “I feel, I feel thy genial flame divine, / And hallow thee and
kiss thy shrine” (ll. 9–10). His is the humility of abashed adoration:
“‘Behold’ – My swimming eyes entranc’d I raise, / But oh! they shrink
before th’ excessive blaze” (ll. 13–14), a humility that allows an English
poem, written in a colonial situation, to become a performance of inter-
cultural intoxication and identification, and thus, different from any
English poetics. Words from Sanskrit individuate the poem: spring is
Bessant, the flowers that adorn Camdeo’s arrows are Chumpa, Amer,
Nagkesar, Kiticum and Bela; other gods like Krishen and Mahadeo are
mentioned with an ease of cultural reference that makes them no different
from the Greek or Roman deities that were staples of English neoclassi-
cism. Nothing in Camdeo’s world is foreign to Jones; all is intimate and
immediate, as is the poet’s request to Camdeo: “Thy mildest influence to
thy bard impart, / To warm, but not consume, his heart” (ll. 79–80).21
As the East India Company consolidated its commercial and territorial
gains, particularly after 1757, India became a lucrative destination not only
for merchants and factors of the company but also for traveling artists. Tilly
Kettle, George Willison, John Thomas Seton, Catherine Read, and the
landscape artists William Hodges and Johan Zoffany (among others) spent
time in India painting portraits of now-wealthy Englishmen and their
families, paintings that featured their possessions and established their
landowning status. Indian rulers and aristocrats also commissioned por-
traits.22 These paintings are a valued record of the development of an
Orientalist style in English art, particularly since they too sought to record
British and Indian lives within the formal conventions that had been
developed to celebrate the lives and possessions of nobility at home.
These painterly conventions shifted to accommodate the novelty of spaces
(both interior and exterior), architecture, and religious and social rituals
and in doing so broadened the scope of British art practice beyond the
canvases of Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. For instance, to
look at Johan Zoffany’s Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match (ca. 1784–1788) is
to find an Indian world teeming with people, in which thirteen Britons (or
perhaps Europeans) join scores of Indians in a festive cockfight. While
there is no question that Colonel Mordaunt is the center of the action, and
the Europeans are the sahibs there, there is a compositional balance
44 suvir kaul
between Europeans and Indians. What is more unusual is that Zoffany
details differences in physiognomy and dress to allow the Indians not to be
massified into a faceless crowd – he understands distinctions that will have
been of social consequence. For Maya Jasanoff, the drama of this canvas
stems from Zoffany’s immersion within the cosmopolitan world of
Lucknow aristocrats and colonial officials, and its vitality derives from its
“cross-cultural” style and substance; she suggests that in its “microscopic
detailing, its flattened perspective and its narrative density,” this painting
“is reminiscent of classic Mughal miniatures.”23
Zoffany (and Arthur William Devis) also painted “Anglo-Indian con-
versation pieces” – that is, paintings that portrayed officials of the East
India Company as if they were landed gentry, “with organic and hereditary
links to land.”24 Beth Fowkes Tobin writes that these paintings both
augmented the social status of company officials, being “the perfect pictor-
ial medium in which to figure themselves as an elite equivalent to the
landed gentry back home” (pp. 94–95), and provided them “with a way to
express and resolve on a visual level some of the tensions produced by living
in a conquered land” (p. 93). Tobin reads Zoffany’s Mr and Mrs Warren
Hastings (1783–1787) as a counterpoint to the large number of English
eighteenth-century garden conversation paintings (or country house paint-
ings) that represent the landowner’s family at ease in his property and thus
“celebrate, commemorate, and legitimate a family’s exclusive possession of
a landed estate” (p. 85). For Hastings to pose in the manner of a hereditary
landowner is of course to dissemble, and his pose is a cultural affront to
both landowning elites at home and to the labor of those Indians whose
taxes made him astonishingly wealthy (and thus a model of the corrupt
nabob). The antagonisms of colonialism are caused to dissolve into the
serene platitudes of the conversation piece, and the British presence in, and
authority over, Indian land is naturalized. Historically, representations
such as this one played a role in legitimizing colonial dominance.
However, as Tobin points out, paintings like Mr and Mrs Warren
Hastings suggest both the ambitions of and the contradictions within
forms of British authority in India. While these paintings are not usually
discussed as part of the visual apparatus of Orientalism in this period, they
certainly perform the same sort of material, documentary and ideological
role.
The impress of the Orient on English style is also visible in another
example, a building built in the Indo-Saracenic style in Brighton (but with
a splendidly eclectic prehistory). The Royal Pavilion was first built by
George, Prince of Wales, in the 1780s, its interiors lavish with chinoiserie
Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century 45
and Chinese furniture and wallpaper. Once king, George IV commis-
sioned the architect John Nash to expand the pavilion buildings into a
palace (a previous set of plans for the buildings and gardens by Humphrey
Repton, also in a promiscuously Oriental style, were set aside), and from
1815 onwards Nash built a remarkably fanciful counterpoint to the Regency
style then in vogue. If the exterior domes and cupolas and columns were in
the Indo-Islamic mode, then the interiors were resplendent in Chinese and
Mughal styles, the whole a startling confection of Orientalist design
vocabularies. The Royal Pavilion and its grounds, though undoubtedly
idiosyncratic, were not unique, for Chinese landscaping styles had trans-
formed some English estates and gardens already. As Elizabeth Chang puts
it, during “the eighteenth century, British gardening style depended on
Chinese influence enough to be termed jardin anglo-chinoise by European
observers.”25 The first account of the planned asymmetries and irregula-
rities of Chinese landscaping had been provided by Sir William Temple in
the essay “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” (1685), and some of these ideas
helped English landscape gardeners (as well as public commentators like
Joseph Addison) refine a style that refused the angularities and symmetries
of French gardens. It is one of the notable ironies of cross-cultural contact
that the “English” style of landscaping (and its inevitably nationalist
difference from French models) germinated after its incorporation of
Chinese design elements and philosophical ideas into its practices.
Chinese motifs and designs also reshaped architectural form as well as
transformed aesthetic values. David Porter has written about the over-
lapping domestication in England of Chinese and Gothic styles, both of
which were “loosely informed by distant, quaintly exotic, and distinctly
anti-classical models.”26 Porter points to William and John Halfpenny’s
Chinese and Gothic Architecture Properly Ornamented (1752) and Thomas
Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754) as
design books that interspersed “Gothic and Chinese fantasies,” and he
goes on to quote an anonymous satirist as writing, “It has not escaped your
notice how much of late we are improved in architecture; not merely by the
adoption of what we call Chinese, nor by the restoration of what we call
Gothic; but by a happy mixture of both” (p. 48). This sort of satiric censure
is one measure of the centrality of the Chinese style to English aesthetics;
another is to be found in the deployment of Chinese aesthetics in debates
between English architects and designers. Sir William Chambers, Yue
Zhuang tells us, worked with a surprising notion of Chinese gardens as
consisting of “scenes of the pleasing, the terrible, and the surprising, which
he emphasized, were capable of exciting opposite and violent sensations.”27
46 suvir kaul
That is, Chambers found in Chinese landscaping the aesthetic qualities of
the sublime as they had been theorized by Edmund Burke in his
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757). In doing so, Chambers developed a counter to the
idealized naturalism of a gardener who epitomized Englishness, Lancelot
“Capability” Brown.28
In attempting to chart the place of Orientalism in eighteenth-century
England, this essay has ranged over disparate territories and histories of
contact as well as examined different forms of representation and systems
of thought. I have argued that even when they were in awe of the social and
economic heft of the Ottomans, Persians, Mughals and other Indian
rulers, or the Ming and Qing emperors, the Edo and Tokugawa shoguns,
travelers and merchants produced reports that both celebrated and sought
to diminish into inferiority these lands and their peoples. Precisely because
there was no stopping the domestic transformations wrought by material
and cultural imports from these lands, English imaginative writers and
intellectuals developed supple vocabularies with which to manage these
transformations, to read into them schemas of civilizational difference that
reasserted Christian and European superiority. The “Orient” was the
promise of riches; it was the challenge of weighty civilizations more
wealthy than, and certainly more ancient than, any comparable
“Occidental” society; it was all that which had to be documented
and analyzed in order to master disparate social systems, religious beliefs
and cultural practices. Such mastery was of course finally the product
of military successes, territorial domination and the putting into
place of the elaborate commercial and bureaucratic systems of colonial
capitalism, but there is no gainsaying the power of the ideas and discursive
system – Orientalism – that eventually legitimized the remaking of the
globe.

Notes
* Suggestions made by Chi-ming Yang and Ania Loomba were crucial to this
essay; my gratitude.
1. This is, in sum, the lesson of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (London: Penguin,
1978). I will not discuss all that is enabling or restrictive in Said’s scholarship;
others have debated those issues at great length. Said’s pioneering insights into
the European imperial response to Muslim lives in Egypt and elsewhere enable
us to understand the operations of Orientalism in territories (India, China,
Japan) not considered by him.
Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century 47
2. See for instance, Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2010). App defines “modern Orientalism” as the eighteenth-
century development of “the secular, institutionalized study of the Orient by
specialists capable of understanding oriental languages and handling primary-
source material” (p. xi). While this definition is narrow – specialized – enough for
him to reject the links between colonialism and Orientalist thought and practice,
I should note that other critics of Orientalism have demonstrated precisely such
links in many of the travelogues and works of enlightenment philosophy
analyzed more benignly by App.
3. For a provocative exploration of such ideas, see Daniel Boyarin,
“Hybridity and Heresy: Apartheid Comparative Religion in Late
Antiquity,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir
Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005), pp. 339–358. See also Orientalism and the Jews, eds.
Ivan Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (Waltham: Brandeis University Press,
2005).
4. See John E. Wills, Jr, “European Consumption and Asian Production in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Consumption and the World of
Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 133–
147. In Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York:
Routledge, 2002), Woodruff D. Smith offers a wide-ranging discussion of the
links between imported goods and changing cultural norms of early modern
Europe.
5. Anne Finch, “Man’s Injustice towards Providence” (1713), II. 11–18.
6. See Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender &
British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
7. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 269.
8. Chi-ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in
Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
2011), p. 6.
9. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 202. See also Eugenia
Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of
Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
10. Robert Batchelor, “Concealing the Bounds: Imagining the British Nation
through China,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 79–92, pp. 80–81.
11. To take just one literary instance of this lack of power, when in Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735) Gulliver, pretending to be a Dutchman,
visits Japan, he has to petition the Emperor to allow him to avoid trampling a
crucifix, a ritual required of all Christian visitors to prove that they are not in
Japan to proselytize. The Emperor lets him off but notes that no Dutchmen
have had any scruples about performing the ceremony.
48 suvir kaul
12. This article focuses on eighteenth-century representations of various forms of
Orientalism, but, as Gerald MacLean and others have pointed out, earlier
English travelers and traders to Ottoman lands, even when they were
fearful of Ottoman politics, were very taken with their wealth and their
cultural achievements. Further, as MacLean argues, while “theological
differences with Islam were important,” they were “nothing like the whole
story,” which was more tolerant and variegated. Gerald MacLean, The Rise of
Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. xiv. Not surprisingly, turquerie – a style
primarily realized in clothing, headdresses, textiles and furnishings – also
came into fashion among the wealthy.
13. Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans.
Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998), p. 3; original emphasis. After Mehmet II
took Byzantium in 1453, the Ottoman Empire was a threat to Christian
European kingdoms for another three centuries and more.
14. Joseph Allen Boone’s The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014) explores the long history of male same-sex desires as
they were articulated across these boundaries. As Boone puts it, the “essence of
any Orientalizing erotics lies in the projection of desires deemed unacceptable
or forbidden at home onto a foreign terrain” precisely “in order to reencoun-
ter those desires” (p. 5).
15. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, eds., The Arabian Nights in Historical
Context: Between East and West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),
p. 4.
16. Bridget Orr, “Galland, Georgian Theatre, and the Creation of Popular
Orientalism,” in Makdisi and Nussbaum, eds. The Arabian Nights, pp. 103–
129, p. 105.
17. See Ros Ballaster, “Introduction,” in Fables of the East: Selected Tales 1662–1785
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also her Fabulous Orients:
Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005).
18. See, for instance, Margaret Ann Doody, The True History of the Novel
(London: HarperCollins, 1997). See also Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel:
Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1957).
19. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the
Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 3–4.
20. Nandini Das, “‘[A] Place Among the Hindu Poets’: Orientalism and the
Poetry of Sir William Jones (1746–1794),” Literature Compass 3:6 (2006): pp.
1235–1252, p. 1245.
21. I have written of these issues in “English Poetry in India: the Early Years,” in A
History of Indian Poetry in English, ed. Rosinka Chaudhuri (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 32–47.
22. See William Foster, “British Artists in India,” Journal of the Royal Society of
Arts 98:4820 (1950): pp. 518–525. Europeans has reported on Indian
Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century 49
(particularly Hindu) art and architecture from the fifteenth century; this
history is meticulously detailed by Partha Mitter in Much Maligned
Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992).
23. Maya Jasanoff, “A Passage through India: Zoffany in Calcutta and Lucknow,”
in Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, ed. Martin Postle (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 125–39, p. 137
24. Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Art and Letters
1760–1820 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 93.
25. Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and
Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 2010), p. 18.
26. David Porter, “From Chinese to Goth: Walpole and the Gothic Repudiation
of Chinoiserie,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23:1 (1999): pp. 46–57, p. 48.
27. William Chambers, Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), quoted by Yue
Zhuang, “‘Luxury’ and ‘the Surprising’ in Sir William Chamber’s Dissertation
on Oriental Gardening (1772): Commercial Society and Burke’s Sublime-
Effect,” Transcultural Studies 2 (2013): pp. 45–76, p. 45.
28. There are further ironies at work here, as we know that two Jesuit painters,
Giuseppe Castiglione and Matteo Ripa, did have some aesthetic influence on
the court of the Kangxi Emperor (1654–1722) and that Castiglione also helped
design palaces and their gardens. Such intercultural exchanges were a muted,
but ongoing, counterpoint to the Orientalist mobilizations considered here.
chapter 2

The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale

James Watt

It is tempting to cite the so-called Grub Street edition of the Arabian

Nights’ Entertainments, translated from Antoine Galland’s Les mille et une
nuits between ca. 1706 and 1721, as a primary point of origin for the
amorphous genre of eighteenth-century prose fiction often referred to as
“the Oriental tale.” The Arabian Nights is famously premised on the idea of
an uncontainable narrative proliferation, as Princess Scheherazade tells
story after story in order to save her life, and in the early eighteenth century
it generated further story-cycles organized around frame narratives that
conjure up analogous kinds of foundational scenario – Persian Tales (1714),
Tartarian Tales (1716), Chinese Tales (1725) and Mogul Tales (1736), to
name but a few. The Nights offered rich inspiration to a wide range of
eighteenth-century writers, not least because it was itself a compendious
textual composite, constituted by processes of interpolation and redaction
as well as translation. Some of its best-known stories, including those of
Aladdin and Ali Baba, may actually have been authored by Galland
himself, and one aspect of the history of the Oriental tale in English that
I will address in this chapter concerns the form’s initial reliance on, then
increasing rejection (or occlusion) of, French cultural mediation. The
Nights’ stories can variously be seen to “reveal the Orient” and to open
“infinite possibilities of fantastic invention and fabrication,” as Marina
Warner has argued, and in what follows I will focus in particular on the
way in which the association of the form both with exotic customs and
manners and with enchantment and magic allowed the Oriental tale to pull
and be pulled in different directions across the period.1
The Arabian Nights is a key point of reference for this chapter, then,
although it is also necessary to acknowledge the significance of prior texts
that were transmitted from France to Britain and helped to stimulate other
forms of literary Orientalism. Galland had started work on an edition of
the tales of the ancient Indian sage Bidpai or Pilpay before he turned to Les
mille et une nuits, and a French edition produced from a Persian text was
50
The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale 51
then translated into English by Joseph Harris in 1699, with the full title
“The fables of Pilpay, a famous Indian philosopher containing many useful
rules for the conduct of humane life.” Pilpay’s animal fables appealed to
readers already familiar with the storytelling of Aesop, and they also found
a receptive audience because, delivered before the Indian king Dabschelim,
they overlapped with works in the similarly established narrative tradition
of the “mirror for princes.” Giovanni Marana’s eight-volume Letters Writ
by a Turkish Spy at Paris (first translated from French in 1687) is an equally
important text with a no less complex production history. Marana’s
fictional spy Mahmut writes back to his Ottoman masters about his
experiences of life in France during the reign of Louis XIV, and this
persona of the detached and reflective observer, constantly comparing
and contrasting, was later adapted by highly sophisticated works such as
Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of
the World (1762).
At the outset, therefore, it is important to emphasize that the “Oriental
tale” is an imprecise classification encompassing a great deal of formal
variety. The distinction that Martha Pike Conant made over a century ago
between “imaginative,” “moralistic,” “philosophic” and “satiric” narra-
tives, though schematic, provides an enduringly useful reminder of both
the range and the ubiquity of fictions of the East in the eighteenth century.2
Recent criticism has focused more on the generic hybridity of the Oriental
tale rather than on any such attempt to enumerate, and differentiate
between, its variants, however: Ros Ballaster, for example, has suggested
that even fable-type narratives with a morally reformist “design” on their
audience still imaginatively absorb readers in the pleasures of story.3
Ballaster and others have additionally argued that the Oriental tale was
hybrid at the level of its diffuse cultural origins too. Certainly at the start of
the eighteenth century it was generally taken as a given that the ceaseless
movement of narrative confounded any attempt to trace any particular
story back to a specific source. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s
persona Mr. Spectator often presents the affinity for fiction as a universal
human attribute, and he implicitly accepts that fiction is inherently trans-
national, invoking a kind of general narrative repository that brings
together stories attributed to Aesop, Homer, Ovid and the Old
Testament, as well as the Arabian Nights and other subsequent collections
of tales.
Mr. Spectator’s omnivorous appetite for narrative is displayed in
Spectator no. 85 when, after alluding to the “Mahometan” custom of
examining any scrap of writing on the ground in case it “contain some
52 james watt
Piece of their Alcoran,” he confesses to having “so much of the Mussulman
in me, that I cannot forbear looking into every Printed Paper which comes
in my way.”4 The Spectator (1711–1714) had an influential role in dissemi-
nating diverse “Eastern” fictions to a wider audience, and no. 578, for
example, bears out the point made in the previous paragraph about the
continuity between ostensibly different kinds of composition. Written by
Eustace Budgell, it begins by alluding to Locke’s ideas on the concept of
identity before then introducing “The Story of the Prince Fadlallah” from
the Frenchman François Pétis de la Croix’s The Thousand and One Days:
Persian Tales. In this abridged version of the story, the Prince comes under
the influence of a “Dervis” who uses the powers of reanimation he has
acquired in order to transform the Prince into a doe (which he then tries to
kill), before himself taking Fadlallah’s place. Though the Prince regains his
identity and kills the Dervis after a lengthy contest between the two shape-
shifting adversaries, his wife Zemroude is so afflicted by her “innocent
Adultery” with the Dervis that she dies from grief; the Prince is so grief-
stricken, in turn, that he retires from the world.5 Since the narrative follows
the Persian Tales’ story so closely and comes without editorial commentary,
it makes possible a form of readerly immersion that is potentially at odds
with Budgell’s framing of the tale as a footnote to Locke.
Elsewhere, however, Mr. Spectator presents such embedded narratives
as illustrative of a larger point, so that in Spectator no. 94, for example, an
account of Lockean ideas of time is glossed with reference to the Koran and
then to “a very pretty story in the Turkish Tales” (translated from French
in 1708).6 Spectator no. 195 refers to “The Story of the Grecian King and the
Physician Douban” from the Arabian Nights but detaches it from the tales
with which it is interwoven and reduces it to a single paragraph, so that it
becomes simply an anecdote about a Sultan who is cured by his doctor
without realizing it. Mr. Spectator presents “The Vision of Mirzah” (in
Spectator no. 159) as founded upon one of “several Oriental Manuscripts”
that he picked up “at Grand Cairo,” in a mimicry of Galland’s scholarly
fieldwork, but this pastiche of an Eastern tale again provides a means to an
end – a generally applicable truth about the human condition – rather than
a dream that is absorbing or diverting in itself.7
If “The Vision of Mirzah” is the best known of all the numerous short
tales to appear in eighteenth-century periodicals, Spectator no. 343 may
represent Addison’s most creative engagement with the possibilities of the
form while at the same time anticipating the subsequent “Anglicization” of
Eastern narrative previously referred to. Via the Spectator Club member
Will Honeycomb, this paper introduces the story of how Jack Freelove
The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale 53
protested against his mistress’s neglect of him by writing to her in the voice
of her pet monkey Pugg. Claiming that he had, centuries prior, been an
“Indian Brachman,” Freelove as Pugg tells of how a demon granted him
the power to live in different animal forms and then details his incarnations
as man and beast both in India and Britain before reminding his addressee
of the beau who was “carried off by a Cold” while serenading her six years
previously. “Not long after my shifting that unlucky Body,” he adds, “I
found my self upon a Hill in Æthiopia, where I lived in my present
Grotesque Shape, till I was caught by a Servant of the English Factory,
and sent over into Great Britain.”8 This tale is energized by the idea of
metamorphosis (which, Will Honeycomb says, “the Eastern parts of the
World [believe] in to this Day”), but, as is demonstrated both by Freelove/
Pugg’s reference to an “English Factory” and by his aside about the “Fleet of
English Ships” that he encountered while embodied as a “flying-fish,” it
also situates the transnational circulation of fiction in the context of a
system of world trade that is centered on London.9 Even as it provides its
audience with a position of amused distance on Will Honeycomb’s flighty
notion that “there might be a great deal said for the Transmigration of
Souls,” Addison’s paper invites readers to appreciate its own familiariza-
tion, on “English” terms, of an “Eastern” doctrine and literary trope.10
Other early eighteenth-century fictions are similarly informed by an
imaginary geography that assumes London to be the hub of global com-
merce where the resources of the world are freely available. While the name
of Daniel Defoe’s heroine Roxana calls up a culturally specific history by
alluding to the slave-turned-empress wife of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the
Magnificent, Defoe’s 1724 novel also allegorizes the domestication of a
more generalized exotic otherness, via the “Turkish” forms of dress and
dance with which Roxana becomes acquainted in Paris and with which –
albeit at subsequent cost – she distinguishes herself during her residence in
St. James’s; elsewhere the novel presents “the Indies” not so much as an
actual locale than as a source of seemingly guaranteed riches. Turkey in the
1720s’ fiction of Penelope Aubin, meanwhile, is an alien and potentially
threatening domain associated with danger rather than alluring promise:
“The Turks and Moors have been ever famous for … Cruelties,” her
preface to captivity narrative The Noble Slaves (1722) states, “and therefore
when we Christians fall into the Hands of … Mahometans, we must expect
to be treated as those heroick Persons, who are the Subject of [this]
Book.”11 Other near-contemporary works take the idea of “Eastern” des-
potism as a given but use this primarily as a lens through which to address
domestic political arrangements. Following Montesquieu’s Persian Letters,
54 james watt
George Lyttelton’s Letters from a Persian in England (1735), for example, has
its narrator Selim invoke his familiarity with despotic rule in order to
identify the dangerous eloquence of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole as
one of the “principal Evils … making Way for arbitrary Power.”12
Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (1736) is
another anti-Walpole work, structured around the contest between its title
character and the enchanter Ochihatou (prime minister of the neighboring
Hypotosa), who attempts to seduce her. While it is steeped in Country
Party rhetoric, this is a hybrid text that also incorporates diverse aspects of a
composite, post-Galland literary Orientalism: it is at once a political satire,
a romance and a footnoted spy narrative in a Chinese register, said on its
title page to be “retranslated into English by the son of a Mandarin … in
London.” Eovaai offers a considerable surplus beyond its satiric transitiv-
ity, therefore, and for Srinivas Aravamudan it is thus exemplary of the
broader cultural phenomenon that he terms “Enlightenment
Orientalism.” Aravamudan, after Said, accepts that later imperial conquest
“turned Orientalism malefic,” but he also emphasizes that much of the
Orientalist fiction of the eighteenth century was playfully reflexive and
premised on relativizing comparison.13 A generic miscellany of works
(“pseudoethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political utopias”) circulated
Easts of the imagination that were “nine parts invented and one part
referential,” he argues, and in these experimental fictions “the self was
under critique as much as any ‘other.’”14
For Aravamudan, “Enlightenment Orientalism” initially flourished at a
remove from the emergent novel but also came to be challenged by it, as
the success of works by Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding established
a new paradigm for prose fiction. Richardson certainly remained indebted
to older forms of storytelling (his heroine Pamela, for example, can be seen
to display the narratorial eloquence associated with Scheherazade), but, as
many critics have argued, his work, together with Fielding’s, helped to
inaugurate a “national realism,” which in turn served to marginalize the
heterogeneous literary forms against which it defined itself.15 The contem-
porary sense of the 1740s as a moment of literary-historical transition is
captured by Francis Coventry’s approving description of the difference of
Joseph Andrews (1742) from some of the fictions that preceded it: “For
crystal Palaces and winged Horses, we find homely cots and ambling nags,
and instead of impossibility, what we experience every day.”16
Samuel Johnson in Rambler no. 4 (1750) similarly – though perhaps
more equivocally – acknowledged a shift in cultural assumptions governing
the production and reception of prose fiction: “The works of fiction, with
The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale 55
which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as
exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen
in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which really are to be
found in conversing with mankind.”17
Johnson repudiated “the help of wonder” in this essay, and in his own
fiction he often adopted the form of the moral fable or “apologue,” as in
Rambler no. 120 (1751), for example, in which Almamoulin, the inheritor of
his merchant father’s vast fortune, is instructed by a sage as to the proper
use of riches. Rambler no. 204 and no. 205 (1752) tell the story of Seged,
“Lord of Ethiopia,” who imagines what it might be to “live without a wish
unsatisfied” before gradually coming to appreciate “the uncertainty of
human schemes” and offering his narrative as proof to future generations
“that no man hereafter may presume to say, ‘this day shall be a day of
happiness.’”18 Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759)
begins as if it were such a fable by addressing “Ye who listen with credulity
to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of
hope.”19 What makes it different from Johnson’s previous works, however,
is that it offers no stable position of critical or moral authority and instead
undercuts the process of enquiry that it initiates. The Prince seeks a
constructive occupation and knowledge of the world beyond the confines
of the Happy Valley, but the only insight that he gains is that the rest-
lessness that drives him is actually an inescapable facet of the human
condition; the Prince’s tutor Imlac has to confront the same essential
truth, conceding that “teachers of morality live like men” and that his
nominal independence leaves him drifting through life rather than making
him any better qualified to advise others.20 Whereas Voltaire’s Candide
(1759), sometimes read as a companion to Rasselas, finishes with the title
character’s entreaty that “we must cultivate our garden,” Rasselas offers no
such call to purposive action, its final chapter announcing itself as a
“conclusion, in which nothing is concluded.”21
One index of the importance of Johnson’s tale is the number of works
which directly or indirectly responded to it. Shortly after its publication,
Oliver Goldsmith wrote a rejoinder, “The Proceedings of Providence
Vindicated” (1759), while another of Johnson’s friends, John
Hawkesworth, wrote Almoran and Hamet (1761), apparently “intended as
a rival to Rasselas.”22 Almoran and Hamet was dedicated to the new
monarch George III, and it likewise situates itself in the “mirror for
princes” tradition, although its narrative of the division of the Persian
monarchy between two brothers – adapted by Samuel Jackson Pratt in his
play The Fair Circassian (1781) – would take on new implications during
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Britain’s war with its American colonies. Frances Sheridan’s The History of
Nourjahad (1767) is a more complex work than Hawkesworth’s, in part
because, while it is structured as a moral fable, with the Persian Sultan
Schemzeddin finally telling the title character “never to suppose that riches
can ensure happiness,” Schemzeddin himself is responsible for orchestrat-
ing the preceding – rather ethically dubious – trial of his friend to
determine whether he is qualified to serve as his “first minister.”23
Sheridan’s tale calls upon “the help of wonder” as a “genius” provides
Nourjahad with the opportunity to indulge his instincts, and, in a reversal
of the customary dynamic of prince and counsellor, it is the Sultan who
assumes the role of sage adviser in order to bring about the reform of his
friend.
While Hawkesworth and Sheridan in different ways engaged with
Johnson’s idiosyncratic version of a “mirror for princes” narrative, others
seized on the wider contemporary resonance of Rasselas, published during
the “year of victories” at the height of the Seven Years’ War. In its tale of the
Prince’s often bewildered experience of life outside the Happy Valley,
Rasselas can be seen to allegorize Britons’ apprehension of their extended
geographical horizons, as they found themselves, in Linda Colley’s words,
“captivated by, but also adrift and at odds in a vast empire and a new
political world which few of them properly understood”; the Prince’s desire
to rule “a little kingdom” of his own encompasses inchoate visions of
empire, we are told, because “he could never fix the limits of his dominion,
and was always adding to his subjects.”24 Orientalist allegories of the 1760s
were sometimes more explicit than this, implicating individuals in the
manner of anti-Walpole satire of the 1730s: Tobias Smollett’s The History
and Adventures of an Atom (1769), for example, tells of events in ancient
Japan as they are imparted to the London haberdasher Nathaniel Peacock
by an omniscient “atom” that lived in the bodies of the key political actors
of the time. Numerous works followed Johnson’s more broadly allusive
example, however, by considering the predicament of generically “Eastern”
societies whose exposure to the wider world presented parallels with the
condition of modern Britain. The “Concluding Tale” in The Orientalist: A
Volume of Tales after the Eastern Taste (1764), for example, describes what
happened to the Egyptian province of “Gojam” (a variant on the
“Gotham” of Wilkite poet Charles Churchill) when its happy “union of
martial and commercial honours” began to be compromised by luxury and
other vices imported from “the servile race of SELIM.”25 This familiar
construction of Ottoman despotism might be regarded as “Orientalist” in a
Saidian sense, but, rather than offer an alibi for empire, it instead performs
The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale 57
a cautionary role, warning about the corruption of native liberty inevitably
following “too servile a compliance with the king’s pleasure.”26
John Shebbeare’s The History of the Excellence and Decline of the
Constitution, Religion, Laws, Manners and Genius of the Sumatrans (1760)
uses a distant domain to tell a very different story about the safeguarding of
British liberty on the accession of George III. If the alternative yet parallel
societies of Shebbeare’s Sumatra and Smollett’s Japan clearly served com-
peting political agendas, however, the Far East, especially China, could also
be represented in intransitive, non-allegorical terms at this time. Oliver
Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World is a particularly interesting text to
consider here, because, while its imaginary Chinese informant, the philo-
sopher Lien Chi Altangi, complains of being exoticized by people unthink-
ingly attached to bogus notions of “Chinese” authenticity, it also (in the
words of David Porter) “delights … in [its] own narrative rendering of the
chinoiserie aesthetic.”27 A hack writer encountered by Altangi confidently
declares that “Eastern tales should always be sonorous, lofty, musical, and
unmeaning,” and he goes on to provide an entertainingly extravagant
example of his own composition in “the true eastern taste,” beginning
with a reference to one “Eben-ben-bolo, who was the son of Ban, … born
on the foggy summits of Benderabassi.”28 Even as it elsewhere satirizes
metropolitan ignorance, therefore, The Citizen of the World intermittently
displays what Aravamudan describes as “a cultivated irresponsibility
towards the cultural referent.”29
At the same time too, though, Goldsmith’s work incorporates brief
allegorical narratives such as “The Rise and Declension of the Kingdom
of Lao,” which tells a familiar story about the domestically destabilizing
effects of colonial conquest. Although the playfully fantastical possibilities
of Orientalist fiction would continue to be explored by others, such as
Horace Walpole in his Hieroglyphic Tales (published in 1785 but written
between 1766 and 1772), the period of reckoning with the scale of territorial
acquisition consequent upon the Seven Years’ War might be seen as
another significant transitional phase in the development of the eight-
eenth-century Oriental tale. This is the case partly because the form proved
to be hospitable to imaginative engagement with the political momentous-
ness of the present, as previously discussed, and partly because it increas-
ingly registered new kinds of more specific awareness of “the East” that
began to circulate as the East India Company established sovereign power
in Bengal. In his An Account of the War in India (1761), for example,
Richard Owen Cambridge referred to “the great reputation which the
nation and so many individuals have acquired in the East Indies.”30 He
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noted that those accustomed to Eastern fictions “full of wonder and
novelty” would already be primed to receive the no-less-improbable story
of how “a handful of Europeans” had been able to dominate “a multitude
of Asiatics,” but he also provided readers with further guidance, in the form
of a “Glossary of Persic and Indian Names,” so as to help mediate what
was – for himself as well as his audience – a hitherto unknown reality.31
James Ridley’s Tales of the Genii (1764) may be the first work to
acknowledge Britain’s empire in the East in “Eastern” narrative. While
the nine purportedly Persian tales in the collection are stylistically deriva-
tive and ostensibly apolitical, they are prefaced by a frame tale which places
their transmission in the larger context of relations between Britain and
India, as the fictional ambassador Sir Charles Morell describes meeting the
enlightened Muslim Horam, who subsequently travels to Britain to further
his education; Horam’s charge that “Traffic is the prophet of the
Europeans, and Wealth is their Alla” shadows the narrator’s closing
account of how “the gaudy Trappings of the East” might serve Christian
truth.32 A decade later, it would still be possible for the Irish novelist
Charles Johnstone, in his The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis (1774), to
describe the fictionalized kingdom of “Byrsa” and its empire and to
repudiate as “pedantry” any fuller substantiation of “the manners of the
times and countries, in which [its] various scenes … are laid.”33 Johnstone’s
The Pilgrim; or, A Picture of Life (1775), however, introduces a Chinese
philosopher writing home about his experiences in Britain, and its adapta-
tion of the genre of informant narrative means that its attention to detail is
very different. Although it names India as “Mogulstan,” as if it were a
fictional realm, The Pilgrim refers to a more specific kind of “East” than
The History of Arsaces, as is especially evident from the stories – for example,
regarding the Black Hole of Calcutta – that are told by the Britons
returning from the subcontinent whom its narrator encounters in the
course of his own sea voyage from China.34
In The History of Arsaces, the reader is told about how the colonies
founded by the Byrsans “felt their own strength” and asserted their inde-
pendence before going on to “[carry] themselves like states allied upon
equal terms, rather than subjects.”35 While this work uses a loosely Oriental
setting to allegorize Britain’s dispute with its American colonists, over the
next decade or so generalizing constructions of “the East” would often
serve a more specific ideological function, helping at once to stabilize the
meaning of “British liberty” and to suggest that it was untarnished by the
disastrous American war. The period during and after this conflict con-
stitutes a further key moment in the history of the Oriental tale, as Eastern
The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale 59
fictions increasingly came to be mediated via revisionist claims about the
truth of Eastern customs and manners, now defined especially in terms of
the oppression of women. In The History of Women (1779), for example,
William Alexander argued that unspecified “eastern tales and romances”
had in the past provided readers with a misleadingly benign sense of
relations between the sexes, whereas in fact men in the East “keep in the
cruellest subjection, the beings they seem to adore, and while they appear
to humble themselves at their feet, are actually the jailors who confine, and
the tyrants who enslave them.”36 More explicitly than Alexander, James
Beattie (in his 1783 essay “On Fable and Romance”) rewrote the Arabian
Nights’ frame tale, in which Scheherazade finally reforms Schahriar, by
describing an Eastern prince who commands his “Grand Visir” to tell
stories merely “to kill the time” and by contrasting the unchanging con-
dition of women in the East with the mixed sociability that pertained in
Britain.37 Robert Heron was similarly emphatic about the realities of
Oriental despotism in his preface to a newly translated collection of
pseudo-Oriental Arabian Tales (1792), where he included the “cooping
up” of “Beauties … by scores, or perhaps hundreds, in a Haram, all for the
amusement of one man” among the “strange and singular” cultural prac-
tices instantiated by the tales.38
Heron’s preface may of course have been ignored by readers eager to
devour a new series of stories (one of which, “Maugraby the Magician,”
helped to inspire Robert Southey’s verse romance Thalaba the Destroyer
[1801]). Despite many instances of such demystifying commentary, numer-
ous popular works testified to the way in which the Arabian Nights,
especially, had become deeply embedded in British culture by the end of
the eighteenth century: the prolific dramatist John O’Keeffe, for example,
produced plays including The Dead Alive (1780), which draws on “The
Story of the Sleeper Awakened,” Aladdin (1788) and The Little Hunch-
Back; or, a Frolic in Bagdad (1789). A work such as Robert Bage’s novel The
Fair Syrian (1787) may nonetheless be seen to underscore its difference
from previous Orientalist fictions, both by accentuating the rhetoric of
sexual despotism and by distancing itself from the romance conventions of
the past. In her retrospect on her early life in the Levant with her merchant
father, its heroine, Honoria Warren, describes the sexual danger that she
faced in “Asia,” appealing to a common knowledge of “the idea of property
… that is visible in the regards of [all] the Orientals.”39 She sometimes
plays this topic for laughs, as when she refers to the “lock-up houses”
established in the era of “that horrid bear, Mahomet.”40 Later on, Honoria
mocks an English gentleman who attempts to seduce her in an “Eastern”
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style, responding to his “cold and lifeless” overtures with her own version
of how to praise female beauty in such an idiom: “‘Her eyes were large and
black, like the eyes of the heifer of Yerak – their lustre surpassed the gems of
Golconda – Her cheeks were the full blown rose of Damascus – Her teeth,
the cypresses of Diarbekir – Her hair was black as the raven’s plumes … ’”41
Bage has his heroine display her enjoyment of Orientalist flights of fancy
here, but this is predicated on her sophisticated awareness of the gulf
between fantasy and reality.
The most remarkable eighteenth-century tale in English, William
Beckford’s Vathek (1786), displays a similar self-consciousness about
the conventions of Orientalist representation. Beckford’s work indi-
cates its contemporaneity through its culturally specific detail, as is
evident from its introduction of Vathek as a historical figure, “ninth
Caliph of the race of the Abassides,” and from its extensive apparatus
of scholarly endnotes, compiled by Beckford’s friend Samuel Henley.
From the outset, however, Vathek also signals its idiosyncracy, as
when it hyperbolizes the legend of the Caliph’s gaze: “when he was
angry, one of his eyes became so terrible, that no person could bear to
behold it; and the wretch upon whom it was fixed, instantly fell
backward, and sometimes expired.”42 Although it is structured as a
kind of fable which finally punishes its protagonist for his “insatiable
curiosity,” the temptation of Vathek by the enigmatic Giaour is
described in obtrusively excessive and tonally ambiguous terms, per-
haps most obviously when the Caliph accedes to the Giaour’s demand
for “the blood of fifty children.”43 The homoeroticism of the text is
especially overt here as Vathek gradually undresses himself while
sacrificing naked boys to the salivating Giaour, in order to gain access
to the latter’s “portal of ebony.”44 Beckford’s tale ends with a refer-
ence to how the effeminate Gulchenrouz, a rival to the Caliph,
“passed whole ages in undisturbed tranquillity, and in the pure
happiness of childhood,” and Hester Lynch Thrale (who thought
Vathek “a mad Book … by a mad author”) saw the tale’s “luscious
Descriptions” of Gulchenrouz as another unseemly display of
Beckford’s “favourite Propensity.”45
Beckford initially wrote Vathek in French, as if harking back to the
creative license of an earlier moment in the history of literary
Orientalism, and, by apparently celebrating the hedonism of the
Caliph as well as the childhood irresponsibility of Gulchenrouz, he
cultivated, in Donna Landry’s words, an “estrangement from
Englishness.”46 The production and reception of Vathek offer a useful
The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale 61
perspective on the range of possibilities that the Oriental tale con-
tinued to provide at the end of the eighteenth century. Whereas
Beckford’s “editor” Samuel Henley saw the purpose of his endnotes
as being “to illustrate the costume” of the work (“otherwise a very
considerable part of its merit must be lost to 999 readers of a
thousand”), the appeal of fictions of the East for Beckford and others
rested precisely in their detachment from any social reality.47 If
translated tales could be read by some as a source of evidence about
Eastern customs and manners, for many readers in the Romantic
period and beyond the Arabian Nights in particular still offered (in
Aravamudan’s phrase) “a fictional mode for dreaming with the
Orient.”48 Coleridge claimed that he “became a dreamer” after his
father burnt his copy of the Nights to put an end to his reading of
the tales, and he later celebrated the “pure imagination” evident in the
story of “The Merchant and the Genie,” where the genie charges
the merchant with having casually discarded a date-shell that put
out the eye of his son.49 This was a tale of pure imagination for
Coleridge precisely because it did not seek to explain – or refer to
anything beyond – itself. Just as Zobeide demands of the men that
come to visit her and her sisters in “The Story of the Three
Calendars” that they “put no questions to us about the reason of
any thing [they] may happen to see,” so in many of the Nights’ tales
readers are asked to suspend disbelief and accept, if not necessarily
accept as true, the fabulous enchantments and incredible scenarios
with which they are entertained.50
In the case of Vathek, however, even as it was assimilated as a
product of the unaccountable domain of “imagination,” faithful to
“the peculiar character of the Arabian tale,” contemporaries also seized
upon the allegorical resonance of its story of an Arabian caliph being
tempted by the promise of riches from the East.51 Vathek’s narrative of
imperial decadence in an Arabian milieu helped Robert Southey to
conceive of the “eastwards” displacement of his revolutionary sympa-
thies in Thalaba the Destroyer.52 This allegorical turn in Romantic
Orientalist poetry was a turn away from the example of writers such
as William Ouseley and Isaac D’Israeli who, inspired by Sir William
Jones, sought to recover Arabian and Persian verse romances that
captured elemental human feelings in “universal” narratives of love
and loss. Southey’s epics were themselves subsequently reworked by
Thomas Moore in Lalla Rookh (1817), a long poem that allegorizes
revolution and rebellion in Ireland in two of its constituent tales but
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also – especially in its frame narrative describing the eventual marriage
of the titular princess – adopts a luxurious and splendidly “ornamen-
tal” idiom that many regarded as pleasing in its own right. Moore’s
enormously popular poem itself divided readers, nonetheless, because
while some praised it for offering “poetical ‘Arabian Nights’
Entertainments’” and a “renewal of the delicious moments of our
childhood, when we first read those wondrous and golden tales,”
others saw it as dishonestly occluding the mundane reality of life in
the East.53 In a similar manner to William Alexander fifty years
earlier, the British Review’s critic, for example, cautioned that in
those “countries” where “amatory poets” celebrate female beauty in
song, “women are merchandize, and men are their proprietors, [and]
the reward of beauty is imprisonment for life.”54
To return to Warner’s argument that the Arabian Nights’ stories can be
seen to “reveal the Orient” and to stimulate “fantastic invention and
fabrication,” then, the history of the eighteenth-century Oriental tale in
English may best be understood as an ongoing process of contestation in
which different creative possibilities were accentuated and different modes
of reading were exercised. Against a broadly Saidian analysis of literary
Orientalist fantasy as the expression of a will-to-empire, recent criticism
has focused especially on the significance of the kind of “delicious
moments” cited above, suggesting that imaginative “transport” might
further entail, in Ros Ballaster’s words, an “abandonment of the sense of
self to an other in a space in which such activity is virtually free of risk.”55
This attempt to recover the potentially transformative experience of read-
ing the Arabian Nights and other fictions of the East has helped to redirect
attention to a rich and diverse field of writing that was once dismissed as
little more than a literary sideshow. From the start of our period onward,
however, as I hope to have shown, some of the most interesting works
under the umbrella heading of the “Oriental tale” can be seen to reject the
“wonder” referred to by the writer in the Monthly Review, often because
they are concerned with the here and now and invoke the East as a way of
thinking about the condition of Britain itself. As is evident in the idea that
Lalla Rookh offered a “renewal” of past pleasures, moreover, appeals to the
East as a realm of the imagination were often couched in self-consciously
nostalgic terms, as if to acknowledge that “dreaming with the Orient” may
have provided a release from social responsibility and the cares of the world
as much as a horizon-expanding encounter with otherness. Leigh Hunt’s
1834 essay “Genii and Fairies of the East, the Arabian Nights, &c.,” with
which I will conclude, nicely captures this point when it distinguishes
The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale 63
between “the Araby and Persia of books” and “the Araby and Persia of the
geographer,” where the former – “the magic land of the child [and] the
ineffaceable recollection of the man” – is said to be paradoxically “more
real” than the latter, “dull to the dull, and governed by the foolish.”56

Notes
1. Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
(London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), p. 24.
2. Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), p. xxvi.
3. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1: pp. 360–361.
5. Addison and Steele, Spectator 4: p. 579.
6. Addison and Steele, Spectator 1: p. 400.
7. Addison and Steele, Spectator 2: p. 121.
8. Addison and Steele, Spectator 3: p. 276.
9. Addison and Steele, Spectator 3: p. 273, III: p. 275.
10. Addison and Steele, Spectator 3: p. 273.
11. Penelope Aubin, The Noble Slaves: Or, The Lives and Adventures of Two Lords
and Two Ladies, Who Were Shipwreck’d (London: E. Bell and others, 1722), p. x.
12. George Lyttelton, Letters from a Persian in England, to his Friend at Ispahan,
2nd ed. (London: J. Millan, 1735), p. 142.
13. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the
Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 11.
14. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 4, p. 3.
15. Srinivas Aravamudan, “In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as
National Allegory,” Novel 33 (1999): pp. 5–31, p. 26.
16. Francis Coventry, “An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr
Fielding” (1751), cited in William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The
Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), p. 33.
17. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, The
Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1969): p. 19.
18. Johnson, Rambler, V: p. 296, p. 297, p. 300, p. 305.
19. Samuel Johnson, “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia,” in Rasselas
and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel
Johnson, vol. 16 (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 7.
20. Johnson, Rasselas, p. 74.
21. Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories, trans. Roger Pearson (Oxford: Oxford
World’s Classics, 1998), p. 99; Johnson, Rasselas, p. 175.
64 james watt
22. Thomas Percy, letter to William Shenstone, cited in introduction to Johnson,
Rasselas, p. lvii.
23. Frances Sheridan, The History of Nourjahad (London: J. Dodsley, 1767), p.
240, p. 3.
24. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1992), p. 103; Johnson, Rasselas, p. 176.
25. The Orientalist: A Volume of Tales after the Eastern-Taste (Dublin: James Hoey
Jr., 1764), p. 279.
26. The Orientalist, p. 280.
27. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 139.
28. Oliver Goldsmith, Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman,
5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 2: p. 145.
29. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 100.
30. Richard Owen Cambridge, An Account of the War in India … (London: T.
Jefferys, 1761), preface, p. iv.
31. Cambridge, preface, p. v; introduction, p. iv.
32. James Ridley, Tales of the Genii: Or, The Delightful Lessons of Horam, the Son of
Asmar, 2 vols. (London: J. Wilkie, 1764), 2: p. xxii, p. 401.
33. Charles Johnstone, The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis, 2 vols. (London: T.
Becket, 1774), 1: p. viii.
34. Charles Johnstone, The Pilgrim: Or, a Picture of Life, 2 vols. (London: T.
Cadell, 1775), 1: p. 7.
35. Johnstone, Arsaces, I: p. 140.
36. William Alexander, The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity to the
Present Time, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1779), 1: p. 195.
37. James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London: W. Strahan and T.
Cadell, 1783), p. 509.
38. Arabian Tales: Being a Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, 4
vols. (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute and others, 1792), 1: p. vii.
39. Robert Bage, The Fair Syrian, 2 vols. (New York and London: Garland
Publishing, 1979 [1787]), 2: p. 85.
40. Bage, Syrian II: p. 36.
41. Bage, Syrian II: p. 248.
42. William Beckford, Vathek, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 2013), p. 3.
43. Beckford, Vathek, p. 19, p. 20.
44. Beckford, Vathek, p. 19.
45. Beckford, Vathek, p. 94, and Thraliana: the Diary of Hester Lynch Thrale (later
Mrs Piozzi), 1776–1809, ed. Katherine C. Balderston, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1942), 2: p. 799.
46. Donna Landry, “William Beckford’s Vathek and the Uses of Oriental Re-
enactment,” in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and
West, eds. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), p. 167.
The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale 65
47. Lewis Melville, Life and Letters of William Beckford (London: William
Heinemann, 1910), p. 130.
48. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 8.
49. Coleridge to Thomas Poole, October 9, 1797, Collected Letters of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1956–71), 1: p. 347; Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990), 1: pp. 272–273.
50. Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, ed. Robert L. Mack (Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1995), p. 74.
51. Monthly Review 76 (May 1786): p. 450.
52. Tim Fulford, introduction to Thalaba the Destroyer, in Robert Southey:
Poetical Works, 1793–1810, 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 3:
p. vii.
53. Monthly Review 83 (May–August 1817): p. 180; and Asiatic Journal 4 (July–
December 1817): p. 457.
54. British Review 10 (1817): pp. 34–35.
55. Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, p. 14.
56. Leigh Hunt, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, vols. 1–2 1834–35 (New York: AMS
Press, 1967), 1: p. 233.
chapter 3

Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism

Saree Makdisi

“From the point of view of governing him rather than from that of
scientific research into how he comes to be what he is, I content myself
with noting the fact that somehow or other the Oriental generally acts,
speaks and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European,” declares
Lord Cromer in Modern Egypt. “Consider the mental and moral attributes,
the customs, art, architecture, language, dress and tastes of the dark-
skinned eastern as compared with the fair-skinned Western,” he adds. “It
will be found that on every point they are the poles asunder.”1 The ease
with which Cromer develops this sharp distinction between “us” and
“them,” Occident and Orient, is evidence of the cultural and political
construction that Edward Said identifies as Orientalism.2 And there is no
doubt that such contrasts were developed, with enormous and enduring
efficacy, especially – in the specific way that Cromer formulates it – from
the late nineteenth century onward, and one can of course find similar
constructs earlier in the nineteenth century and in the eighteenth. The
problem with these formulations in these earlier moments, however, was
that the Western “us” being designated, and the concomitant claim to
“our” space that was being established alongside it, were hardly as stable
and clear as Cromer would claim to find them by the turn of the twentieth
century when he was writing Modern Egypt.
For in those earlier moments, many of the would-be “us,” even if light-
skinned, were also Orientalized, and much of what ought to be “our”
space, including territories right in the heart of the imperial capital, were
also Orientalized. The addendum to Said’s argument that I am proposing
here, then, is not that the Orient/Occident opposition wasn’t made, nor
that it wasn’t as stark as he claimed it was – because it was. Rather, what I
want to suggest is that, until much later than we normally imagine, there
was no possibility of making the East/West opposition simply on the large
geographical scale that Cromer (or, later and more critically of course,
Said) has in mind, because it was also taking place on a much smaller scale
all over England itself. In other words, not all of England, let alone all of

66
Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism 67
Europe – and hence not all Englishmen or all Europeans – could be clearly
identified as Occidental at the time when the East/West binary was first
being developed in a systematic way in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.
Thus, despite the explosion of interest in the Orient during the
Romantic period, and indeed right through the first half of the nineteenth
century at the very least, it would have been impossible to fit all of England
and all English people into an Occident imagined and configured as the
opposite of the Orient.3 This was so not merely because – as scholars have
often noted4 – people from across Britain’s Asiatic empire were physically
present in London and indeed (as De Quincey’s Lake District encounter
with the Malay wanderer in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater remind
us) throughout England, but because England was already seen to be
contaminated by its own indigenous territories and populations, however
fair-skinned they may have been, that quite suddenly came to be
Orientalized in the late eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth.
In order for the stark binary opposition expressed by Cromer to work on
a geographically large scale, then, spaces and populations internal to
England (and similar processes took place or are still taking place in
other European countries) had to be reconfigured in order for them to
emerge as clearly Western as opposed to a geographically distant East.
Thus, an internal Occidentalism, and an internal process of
Occidentalization, had to take place alongside and in relation to an
Orientalism and Orientalization that would ultimately be directed beyond
England’s borders, even though – for much of the Romantic period and
into the nineteenth century – it was at least as interested in internal peoples
and spaces as it was in properly foreign ones.
These internal processes were connected to broader social, economic,
political and cultural transformations in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries and to the emergence of a concept of what we
would today recognize as Westernness: a concept that of course draws on
the legacy of similar oppositions, such as those between civilization and
barbarism or Christendom and Islam, and so on – though this time the
opposition came to be articulated in temporal and historical terms in
relation to the broader discourses and processes of modernization. Thus
this emergent notion of a West was not opposed to the East solely on moral
grounds, for example (though those were also always there of course), but
because it came to be seen as more advanced, more developed, further
along the linear path of modernization – all of which were new concepts at
the time.5 These processes of separation started taking place in a systematic
68 saree makdisi
way in the Romantic period, when it came to seem desirable, from a certain
point of view, to begin to locate and demarcate a socially, politically and
culturally empowered Occidental territory and people. My claim here is
that the process of Occidentalism defined British imperial culture not only
externally but also from within; it must be seen to be aligned with
an Orientalist logic articulated by Cromer – and rightly identified by
Said – that would in the long run be directed exclusively overseas.
Occidentalism and Orientalism, in other words, are not opposites: they
are two sides of the same coin, ultimately inseparable from one another.
The symbiotic relationship between Occidentalism and Orientalism
helps explain why all the way through the Romantic period the
discourse of Orientalism was used at least as much with reference to
the would-be West as it was with reference to the East. For at the
dawn of Romanticism in the 1790s, Orientalist tropes were primarily
deployed by anti-aristocratic radicals not to refer to actual Arabs or
Indians (about whom they knew almost nothing and cared even less)
but rather to refer primarily to either the privileged classes above them
in the social hierarchy or those further down the social scale. From
this middle-class viewpoint, both the higher and the lower orders were
increasingly seen to be “not us” due to their apparent infection with a
kind of Oriental contamination – or at least association.6 Thus the
language of Orientalism was consistently used to separate a supposedly
virtuous middle class from both those above them (“the proud and
polished, the debauched, effeminate, and luxurious,” as John Thelwall
of the radical London Corresponding Society identified them)7 and
those below them (those, according to Tom Paine, who “are rather
the followers of the camp than of the standard of liberty, and have yet
to be instructed how to reverence it”).8
The political stakes of this specifically Romantic form of Orientalism
stem from its location in a transitional moment between two otherwise
quite distinct modes of Orientalism. For we can see in the Romantic period
both the final traces of an earlier eighteenth-century configuration and the
first signs of a much more hostile new order – the one that would find
expression in Macaulay’s writing and ultimately in Cromer’s assessment of
the Orient in Modern Egypt. Whereas the older formation that was starting
to disintegrate by the 1790s was not invested in the transformation of the
East, and had little to say about the West (and certainly not as such), the
new formation emerging at the same time was driven by the perceived need
to differentiate and improve the West by making it specifically Western as
opposed to Eastern; we might even say that one of its primary concerns as it
Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism 69
began to emerge was the de-Orientalization of a still only putatively
emergent West.
Thus the late eighteenth-century version of British Orientalism that
helped prepare the way for Romanticism was itself different from the forms
of Orientalism that had preceded it earlier in the century. By the 1770s and
1780s, Orientalism was increasingly preoccupied with the business (lit-
erally) of knowing the Oriental for the purposes of imperial government
and the forms of commerce with which the latter was involved. In other
words, it was unabashedly instrumental and expedient, bound up with the
exigencies of colonial administration. “Every accumulation of knowledge,
and especially such as is obtained by social communication over whom we
exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest,” wrote Warren
Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal, in the preface to the first English
translation (1785) of the Bhagavad-Gita, “is useful to the state.”9 The forms
of Orientalism that had gone before – above all the Arabian Nights and its
countless derivations or imitations – seemed almost innocuous by compar-
ison, concerned as they were with entertainment and amusement and
sometimes moral instruction of their readers.
It was indeed inevitable that the stakes of Orientalism would change as
British rule over India was deepened and expanded and cultural interests
would be more heavily invested in Britain’s imperial project in the East. By
the 1770s, the new form of Orientalism was developing as a by-product of the
policy instituted by Warren Hastings to govern the possessions of the East
India Company in local languages (or at least those of the local learned elites).
The Company started using Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit in their administra-
tion of India, which required, of course, the acquisition of those languages and
the greater understanding of their cultures as the British tried, in Hastings’ own
estimation, to “adapt our Regulations to the Manners and Understanding of
the People, and Exigencies of the Country.”10 Thus from then on it was for the
purposes of intelligence, government and command – not simply entertain-
ment – that Oriental texts started to be investigated, translated and circulated.
Hastings himself encouraged the translation of classic texts into English and a
wider process of cultural adaptation that would allow Britons to study Indian
languages in order to master the culture from within. Javed Majeed has argued
that the urge “to draw ‘orient knowledge from its fountains pure’” was applied
both to the process of legal codification and to the process of generating
imaginative works and works of fiction.11
It was at this moment that the British started developing a much more
robust and elaborate apparatus of knowledge, including treatises, diction-
aries, grammars and translations of ever more Oriental works, both
70 saree makdisi
scholarly and literary. “Seen as a corpus, these texts signal the invasion of an
epistemological space occupied by a great number of Indian scholars,
intellectuals, teachers, scribes, priests, lawyers, officials, merchants, and
bankers, whose knowledge as well as they themselves were to be converted
into instruments of colonial rule,” Bernard Cohn argues. “They were now
to become part of the army of babus, clerks, interpreters, sub-inspectors,
munshis, pandits, qazis, vakils, schoolmasters, amins, sharistadars, tahsil-
dars, deshmukhs, darogahs, and mamlatdars who, under the scrutiny and
supervision of the white sahibs, ran the everyday affairs of the Raj.” Thus,
Cohn concludes, “the conquest of India was the conquest of knowledge.”12
At the same time, of course, this conquest of knowledge had both
deliberate and unintentional by-products, including the inspiration of a
whole generation of British (and indeed European) writers and artists. Sir
William Jones, who was a judge in the East India Company, was explicit in
his insistence that European writers would gain immeasurably from their
exposure to the new Oriental knowledge. According to Jones, the East is
“the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene
of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human genius, abounding
in natural wonders, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and
government, in the laws, manners, customs, and languages, as well as in the
features and complexions of men”;13 it also offers a source of literary
inspiration to Europeans. “I must request,” Jones writes in the conclusion
to one of his essays on the poetry of the Eastern nations, that
in bestowing these praises on the writings of Asia, I may not be thought to
derogate from the merit of the Greek and Latin poems, which have been
justly admired in every age; yet I cannot but think that our European poetry
has subsisted too long on the perpetual repetition of the same images, and
incessant allusions to the same fables: and it has been my endeavour for
several years to inculcate this truth, that, if the principal writings of the
Asiaticks, which are reposited in our public libraries, were printed with the
usual advantage of notes and illustrations, and if the languages of the Eastern
nations were studied in our great seminaries of learning, where every other
branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection, a new and ample field
would be opened for speculation; we should have a more extensive insight
into the history of the human mind; and we should be furnished with a new
set of images and similitudes; and a number of excellent compositions
would be brought to light, which future scholars might explain and future
poets might imitate.14
What Jones proposed, then, was to establish a cultural and literary
parallel to the extraction of material wealth from the East and to transfer
Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism 71
both sets of treasures safely back to Britain. Once there, this developing
interest in and knowledge of the East flourished in all kinds of ways, and it
was quickly appropriated in early Romanticism, not simply for the pur-
poses of further knowledge of the Other but also for the beginning of a new
process of cultural and political self-definition in opposition to this won-
derfully exotic Other. Although it may have been inspired by contact with
other cultures, then, this emergent process of self-definition quickly grew
into a project that had little to do with the cultural others who had inspired
the urge to find self-awareness in the first place.
The process of knowing more about the Other came to require, that is,
not only knowing what made the Other different but also what made “us”
who “we” are, what provided the identity of the self. The exploration of
cultural difference urged on by people like Hastings and Jones thus led to a
quest for a clearer sense of the identity of the Western self from which the
cultural difference of the East marked such a departure. In defining and
elaborating the Orient as a field of study, in other words, writers from what
was suddenly becoming identifiable as the West had to clear the space for
the emergence of an Occident against which the Orient’s difference could
be surveyed. This entailed, and in the 1790s quickly led to, a new, modern
sense of national and racial subjectivity, an empowered sense of self that
was defined not merely against Asiatic others but also against many
Orientalized others at home – who were seen to be just as incompatible
with this emergent new identity as their actual Asiatic counterparts.
Thus the sense of self – both individual and collective, as a racial or
civilizational formation – that emerged in the Romantic period was com-
prehensively entangled with an Orientalist discourse. References to the
Orient saturate Romantic-period writing, and not only in terms of external
exoticism (as in Byron’s Turkish tales for example) but also, consistently, in
domains that ought on the face of it to have nothing to do with the East at
all. This is because the Orient became integrated into almost every attempt
to articulate a modern sense of selfhood in the period. The collective sense
of subjectivity presupposed on “our” ability to govern ourselves as indivi-
duals was consistently premised on a distinction from, and superiority
over, a claimed Eastern lack of self, or, more precisely, the supposed
inability of Orientals to govern themselves, either at the level of the
individual or as a collective. Thus a running contrast emerged, from the
1790s onward, between a supposedly manly, forceful, productive, honest
and virtuous (because self-regulating) Western self and an effeminate or
feminine (the difference seemed immaterial), luxuriating, lazy and indul-
gent Eastern other who was seen to be incapable of self-regulation.
72 saree makdisi
The distinction between Occident and Orient thus came to center on
the difference between a self-regulating form of subjectivity and a form of
identity not capable of self-regulation. And as this sense of difference
developed through the period, a concern with the “actual” Orient (of
course there is no such thing as such – the Orient is a construct of
imaginative geography, as Said himself points out) in many cases seemed
to recede as the obsession with its opposite, the self-regulating West, grew.
The Romantic-period obsession with the self, whether the sense of self
associated with the subject of a sublime vista (think of Wordsworth and the
view of Snowdon in The Prelude) or the sense of self connected to the
struggle for democracy and self-representation at a political level, was
invariably articulated in terms of a claim to Occidental superiority. It
was Occidentalist, in other words, because of its concern with the self,
and simultaneously Orientalist because of the way in which this sense of
self was predicated on – and articulated in opposition to – the imaginary
construction of an Other. For the Orient would be invoked above all as an
imaginary site on which to project all those political and ideological
modes of existence – idleness, femininity, luxury, religious enthusiasm,
violence – that were seen to be the opposites of the form of identity and
selfhood associated with the West and, at that, with a specifically bourgeois
notion of Western identity.
Some concrete examples will help establish this claim. When the intel-
lectuals associated with the radical movement for democratic rights in
Britain wanted to defame their aristocratic opponents in order to delegi-
timize their arguments, they did so by Orientalizing them. Thus the real
enemy of the radical cause was conflated with an imaginary enemy, and the
faults of the former were expressed in terms of the supposed racial and
civilizational flaws of the latter. Quite systematically, in other words,
radical intellectuals not only elaborated the Orient as the locus of degen-
eration and corruption (because Orientals lacked self-control, the argu-
ment went, they were inevitably degenerate and corrupt); they also
projected the alleged attributes of Oriental culture on the British (and
more generally European) aristocracy. I’ve written elsewhere about this
move in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of
Woman,15 but that text is worth returning to here precisely because
although at face value – as an argument on behalf of women’s rights in
England – it ought to have nothing whatsoever to do with the East, it is
quite saturated with references to the Orient.
In Vindication, Wollstonecraft dismisses “that weak elegancy of mind,
exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the
Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism 73
sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel.” She refuses to “polish” her style
and insists that, since she hopes “rather to persuade by the force of my
arguments than to dazzle by the elegance of my language,” she will not
waste her time “in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast
of artificial feelings.” She declares that she will do her best “to avoid that
flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and from novels
into familiar letters and conversations.”16 In case a reader might miss the
subtext here, Wollstonecraft makes it clear in the opening sentences of her
book that her strident rhetorical position is articulated against the “style of
Mahometanism.”17
Really there ought to be no surprises here. Wollstonecraft was hardly the
only writer by the end of the eighteenth century to suggest that the Orient
was the source of that flowery diction, that dazzling (but bewildering and
entrapping) elegance, that weak, effeminate language, those “pretty super-
latives, dropping glibly from the tongue,” which “vitiate the taste, and
create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned
truth,” that “deluge of false sentiments and overstretched feelings, stifling
the natural emotions of the heart,” which “render the domestic pleasures
insipid, that ought to sweeten those severe duties, which educate a rational
and immortal being for a nobler field of action.”18 What was at stake in her
denunciation of the East, however, was not simply her gratuitous disdain
for a culture about which she (like most English writers) knew next to
nothing but rather, on the contrary, her concern for the articulation and
development of its putative opposite, an Occidental culture premised on
all the opposite values: candor as opposed to pretty superlatives; unadorned
truth as opposed to glib sweetness; rational capacity as opposed to over-
stretched feelings; natural emotions as opposed to false sentiments – and in
general manly rational virtue as opposed to unmanly hysteria. What
Wollstonecraft aims to articulate, in other words, is an objective, forceful,
masculine (a term she frequently defends and applies to women) discourse
of rights; a discourse that can be recognized as Western without naming it
as such because it is so clearly articulated over and against its very-much-
named Eastern opposite.
For all her mentions of “seraglios” and the “arts of seduction” connected
to them, however, and for all her false insinuations that according to
Islamic belief women have no souls, it is clear that the primary targets of
Wollstonecraft’s animus for the East are actually not Easterners themselves
but rather the debauched aristocracy of Europe, whom Wollstonecraft
chastises precisely by Orientalizing them. For the members of the upper
class in England, according to Wollstonecraft, live, much like fictional
74 saree makdisi
Oriental potentates, a life of unnatural dissipation, moral enfeeblement
and supine effeminacy, because of their unlicensed and unregulated sub-
mission to sensual passions and drives, their indulgence of pleasures at the
expense of hard, sober work. “The education of the rich tends to render
them vain and helpless, and the unfolding mind is not strengthened by the
practice of those duties which dignify the human character,”
Wollstonecraft argues. “Weak, artificial beings raised above the common
wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner,
undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through
the whole mass of society!”19 The rich, in other words, are essentially
Oriental in all their key attributes; they require Occidentalization if they
are to be redeemed at all. European women in particular have been reduced
to playthings in a seraglio fantasy, she argues; redeeming them involves
Westernizing them, teaching them – and erstwhile Western men for that
matter – to be honest, forthright, candid, virtuous and absolutely the
masters and repressors of their bodily desires (the very desires that
Orientals and unreformed European aristocrats alike love to indulge in
their various palaces and pleasure domes).
As with the discourse of Orientalism in general, such a link between the
European aristocracy and the East was hardly unique to Wollstonecraft.
Montesquieu had already made this connection, and other Enlightenment
writers had developed it. But this connection would explode (rhetorically)
in the 1790s. Exactly such a move underlies Tom Paine’s attack on Burke in
Rights of Man. Paine argues that Burke “is not affected by the reality of the
distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his
imagination,” that he “pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.” And
in so doing, Paine is able to reconfigure his opponent as a fawning servant
of kings and priests, for whom “shew and magnificence” constitute a kind
of substitute reality, an imaginative world to be accessed via flying sentry-
boxes, just as in the Arabian Nights. “Accustomed to kiss the aristocratical
hand that hath purloined him from himself,” Paine writes, Burke “degen-
erates into a composition of art, and the genuine soul of nature forsakes
him. His hero or his heroine must be a tragedy-victim expiring in show,
and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a
dungeon.”20 Paine says he refuses “to follow Mr. Burke through a pathless
wilderness of rhapsodies, and a sort of descant upon governments, in which
he asserts whatever he pleases, on the presumption of its being believed,
without offering evidence or reasons for so doing.” Paine insists that
“before anything can be reasoned upon to a conclusion, certain facts,
principles, or data, to reason from must be established, admitted, or
Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism 75
denied” (pp. 64–65) and that Burke’s flowery, imaginative and hence
pseudo-Oriental discourse is not compatible with such reasoning.
Paine, like Wollstonecraft, insists that the real problem with those
“polished manners” that “render vice more dangerous, by concealing its
deformity under gay ornamental drapery” is not merely a matter of
morality. Substituting the “plumage” for the “dying bird,” the “showy
resemblance” for the “reality of distress,” the “tragedy-victim dying in
show” for the “real victim of misery,” a pretend reality (of “art,” “show”
and “tragedy”) for genuine reality (the reality of “facts, principles, and
data”) takes one away from objective facts – the terrain appropriate to the
Occident – and leaves one in a miasma of false excesses: the domain of the
Orient. The allure of vice rendered “more dangerous, by concealing its
deformity under gay ornamental drapery” doesn’t just seduce and mislead
the would-be Western observer: it allows him to be “purloined” from
himself, Paine argues; in other words, to lose his very capacity for indivi-
duality. Showy style, elaborate forms of writing, excessive figuration,
inflated phraseology – in short, the essential elements not just of Burke’s
Reflections as read by Paine and Wollstonecraft but above all of Oriental
and pseudo-Oriental style, the ultimate “pathless wilderness of rhapsodies”
– are bad not just because they prevent us from engaging with “facts,
principles, and data”; they are bad because they prevent genuine self-
knowledge, self-awareness and self-control. Art is to be distinguished
from reality by the same mechanisms that allow us to distinguish excess
from simplicity, idleness from vigor, unfounded assertion from reasoned
argument, the artificial from the natural, the useless from the useful, the
unmanly from the manly and hence, ultimately, the East from the West:
our others from our selves.
For Romantic-era radicals such as Paine and Wollstonecraft, the con-
tours of individual freedom must be defined by voluntary self-regulation,
self-limitation, self-denial – a rejection of figurative and verbal, as well as
bodily and sensual, excess – rather than by externally enforced regulation,
limitation and denial. While the radicals’ lengthy excurses on style, and in
particular their refusal of “polish” and “art” in the name of natural
simplicity and forthright “manly” honesty, are meant to express their
rejection of the politics of feudalism and aristocracy as represented by
Burke, they are actually articulated as a systematic repudiation of the
excess, luxury and idleness of the East. Their critique of the ancien régime
represented by Burke, in other words, takes the shape of an attack on
Oriental style and a celebration instead of a newly found Western style,
enabling the constitution of a self-regulating sovereign Occidental subject.
76 saree makdisi
This line of thought was only emergent in the 1790s; its proponents
were, after all, radicals and revolutionaries, many of whom (like Thelwall)
were tried for treason, and some of whom (like Paine) were actually
sentenced for their transgressions. Fast-forward a few decades, however,
and we can see these once-radical ideas settling down into respectable
institutionalization, especially as Britain’s long struggle for democracy
passed its first major hurdle with the Reform Act of 1832. So it is no
coincidence that, almost word for word, exactly the same arguments that
people like Paine or Wollstonecraft leveled against Burke in the 1790s
would be reiterated – knowingly or otherwise – by thinkers such as
Thomas Macaulay in the 1830s. Consider Macaulay’s devastating review
of Robert Southey’s Colloquies, in which he compares the Poet Laureate to
Burke’s irrational excesses and finds him even more excessive. For while
Burke “chose his side like a fanatic, and defended it like a philosopher,”
and while he could “defend the wildest course by arguments more plausible
than those by which common men support opinions which they have
adopted after the fullest deliberation,” reason in the mind of Southey,
according to Macaulay,
has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He
does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments
himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his oppo-
nents. It has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some
better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely
that it is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that
there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumour
does not always prove a fact, that a single fact when proved, is hardly
foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot
be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it, or
that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more
convincing than “scoundrel” and “blockhead.”
For, Macaulay concludes, drawing on what was by the 1830s the full
spectrum of Orientalist thought,
it would be absurd to read the works of such a writer for political instruc-
tion. The utmost that can be expected from any political system promul-
gated by him is that it may be splendid and affecting, that it may suggest
sublime and pleasing images. His scheme of philosophy is a mere day-
dream, a poetical creation, like the Domdaniel cavern, the Swerga, or
Padalon [references to Southey’s own Oriental epics], and indeed it bears
no inconsiderable resemblance to those gorgeous visions. Like them, it has
something of invention, grandeur, and brilliancy. But, like them, it is
Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism 77
grotesque and extravagant, and perpetually violates even that conventional
probability which is essential to the effect of works of art.21
It should come as no surprise, then, that – having Orientalized it
– Macaulay should find Southey’s work intellectually and aesthetically
barren (“wholly destitute of information and amusement”), since that was
also his assessment of Oriental culture in his famous (or infamous) Minute on
Indian Education, which he wrote only shortly after writing his review of
Southey. He argues in that document that India’s vernacular languages
“contain neither literary nor scientific information” and that the sum total
of historical information contained in even the learned languages of India
(Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit) “is less valuable than what may be found in the
most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England.” This too
should hardly come as a surprise, since, according to the Minute, those
learned languages express “medical doctrines, which would disgrace an
English farrier, – Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an
English boarding school, – History, abounding with kings thirty feet high,
and reigns thirty thousand years long, – and Geography, made up of seas of
treacle and seas of butter.”22 Southey’s Orientalization is not merely insepar-
able from what Macaulay claims are his intellectual and philosophical faults:
it expresses those faults exactly. Southey is Orientalized to the extent that he
is wrong, misguided, deluded, irrational, inaccurate and extravagant; and he
is wrong, misguided, deluded, irrational, inaccurate and extravagant pre-
cisely to the extent that he is Orientalized.
But there is another vital piece to the puzzle of Orientalism and
Occidentalism by the time we get to the demise of Romanticism in the
1830s, which really is what Macaulay’s devastation of Southey represents in
so many ways. For Southey is also, by the 1830s, a fish out of water in
England in Macaulay’s estimation: not only because of his Oriental affilia-
tions but also because he stubbornly clings to modes of thought, obstinate
traditions and customs that had long since been rendered obsolete in
England itself. For, according to Macaulay, progress must unfold in
England as much as in India; indeed, that England was further along the
spectrum of progress was precisely what rendered it superior to India.
Emotionally clinging to worn-out traditions in the face of rational pro-
gress, which is Macaulay’s main accusation against Southey, is a telltale
sign of Oriental weakness. Not only is the Poet Laureate utterly destitute of
the power of discerning truth from falsehood and guilty of those peculiarly
Oriental sins of believing without reason and hating without provocation;
he is also guilty of substituting images for realities – yet another Oriental
78 saree makdisi
trait. “Government is to Mr. Southey one of the fine arts,” Macaulay
writes. “He judges of a theory, of a public measure, of a religion or a
political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge of a picture or a statue, by
the effect produced on his imagination. A chain of associations is to him
what a chain of reasoning is to other men; and what he calls his opinions
are in fact merely his tastes.” Thus, he concludes, “Mr. Southey’s political
system is just what we might expect from a man who regards politics, not as
a matter of science, but as a matter of taste and feeling.” For Macaulay, of
course, progress is made possible precisely by allowing science and disci-
pline to override not only taste and feeling but also long-established
customs, stubborn prejudices and outmoded practices – in England as
much as in India. England had to be made Western, in other words, just as
Occidental modernization must also now be brought to India itself. To
acknowledge this is to embrace the Occidental imperative; to resist it, as
Macaulay says Southey does, is to remain trapped in Oriental delusion.
This deployment of the East not merely as a kind of entertaining fantasy
alternative to the West but as the antagonistic basis for the articulation of a
distinctly Occidental mode of subjectivity – with which a Burke or a
Southey clearly are not compatible – must be read in relation to a shift
in actual imperial policy with which it was bound up, for Macaulay
represents the climax of a shift that had started to take place in the 1790s.
We have already seen how earlier colonial administrators such as Hastings
and Jones were interested in the East at least in part because of its refreshing
difference from Europe, hence the policies of the Hastings administration
which emphasized translating and reading Asiatic literature in order to
learn from it. With the demise of Warren Hastings following his trial on a
charge of high crimes and misdemeanors, a series of reforms in the British
administration of India were carried out, beginning in 1793, accelerating
after 1813 (the date when missionaries were first officially allowed to work in
India) and reaching full pitch only by the 1830s. One of the most com-
mitted advocates of this new approach to imperial policy was Charles
Grant, who took a position exactly opposed to that of William Jones.
Whereas Jones had insisted that the Orient was “the nurse of sciences, the
inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile
in the productions of human genius,” for Grant it was a scene of sensory
excess and intellectual and moral degradation. “We cannot avoid recogniz-
ing in the people of Hindostan,” Grant wrote as early as 1792, “a race of
men lamentably degenerate and base; retaining but a feeble sense of moral
obligation; yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right,
governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the
Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism 79
effects produced on society by a great and general corruption of manners,
and sunk in misery by their vices.”23 Grant would go on to advocate the
moral improvement of the natives, beginning with their conversion to
Christianity, and his advocacy was one of the driving forces behind open-
ing India to missionaries after the reforms of 1813.
Just note, however, how Grant’s denunciation of Indians’ degeneration,
their enfeebled state, their lack of morality, their disregard for reason, their
submission to licentious passions and drives, their total ignorance of discipline
and hard work, and their general state of vice and corruption aligns so cleanly
not only with Macaulay’s assessment of Southey but also with Wollstonecraft’s
condemnation of European aristocrats on precisely the same grounds three or
four decades earlier. In the overlap between Grant, Wollstonecraft and
Macaulay we can recognize the extent to which, as I suggested earlier,
Occidentalism and Orientalism are not opposites, as they are sometimes
taken to be, but rather operate on a continuum. The same civilizing process
needed to be carried out in both England and its colonial possessions, includ-
ing India; in England in order to purge the last traces of Oriental contamina-
tion from what was supposed to be an Occidental space; and in the colonial
world in order to begin the challenging process of converting Oriental “vice
and misery” into the universal culture of Occidental modernity.
And yet it must be said that it is one thing to use an Orientalist discourse
to depict an Other out there in the East but quite another – if Englishmen
like Southey can also be Orientalized – to locate the putative West against
which that East is being dialectically counterposed. Where was this West, if
both the degenerate aristocracy and the teeming multitudes in England
were infected with Oriental traits (indulgence, passion, rage, emotion,
enthusiasm, lack of self-control, etc.)? Marking the Other is relatively
easy, in other words; but designating the “we” who fit into the collective
(in this case Western) self is not so easy. And finding a territory that is
“ours” in that sense – in the sense in which everyone “here” is one of “us” as
opposed to one of “them” – is more difficult still. Thus the “we” being
designated here is not the nationalist “we” of the sort captured in the work
of, say, Benedict Anderson or Linda Colley but rather a racial or a civiliza-
tional one, even though discussions of these much narrower notions of
national identity have dominated eighteenth-century and Romantic stu-
dies for some time now.24 The “we” that I am talking about actually at
certain moments excludes large segments of the nation – patricians and
plebeians both – while it could readily be extended to those beyond the
nation (to those in America and France, for example). It is in fact a “we,”
this sense of affiliation with a West, that much of the recent work on
80 saree makdisi
nationalism has not sufficiently taken into account; it overlaps with the
sense of the nation in some instances and transcends it in others. One
reason it has not been taken into account is that it was, at the time, assumed
rather than explicitly named as such: for all the exploding proliferation of
frankly Orientalist discourses in this period, it is difficult, if not impossible,
to locate an explicitly Occidentalist discourse. It was clear, then, that there
was an East, out there somewhere; but its dialectical twin, the West, was
not so readily named and geographically designated – at least not then. It
was still very much in the process of formation and consolidation.
What one finds in portrayals of the interior of England in the years around
1800, then, is an unstable mixture of racial types, corresponding to different
degrees of access to Westernization. What distinguishes the putative metro-
politan center from the outer reaches of the empire at this stage is that,
whereas the development and deployment of a racial language to depict
overseas Others – for example the Orientalization of the Orient – is, and
would remain until the twentieth century and after, more or less compre-
hensive and all-encompassing, 25 the deployment of the same language in the
domestic interior of England in the decades around 1800 is uneven and
actually being dismantled as “civilization” and Occidentalism are spread:
“they” out there in India or Africa or Arabia may be all the same, but “we”
are not all yet really “we” in 1800. What distinguishes foreign from
domestic space, in other words, is partly a matter of degree: “they” are
completely Oriental; “we” are at least partly Western – and we are working
on civilizing – recoding, implicitly reclassifying as “Western” or
“Occidental” – the rest of our countrymen, or at least those of them who
can be redeemed. It is in this sense that the process of Occidentalism relates
to that of Orientalism: it is about locating and clearing a space for a white,
Western self who could one day be more effectively counterposed to the
Orient out there as, in Cromer’s words, the poles asunder.

Notes
1. Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan,
1908), 2: p. 144, p. 164.
2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
3. This is an argument that I develop at length in Making England Western:
Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2014), from which many of the strands of argument developed in this
essay are also derived.
4. See, e.g., Sanjay Krishnan, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s
Empire in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 70–71.
Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism 81
5. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986).
6. See Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 214–259.
7. John Thelwall, “Rights of Britons” (1795), repr. in The Politics of English
Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park:
Penn State University Press, 1995), p. 473.
8. Tom Paine, Rights of Man (1792; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp.
58–59.
9. Warren Hastings, “Introductory Letter,” in The Bhagavad-Geeta, or Dialogues
of Kreeshna and Arjoon, trans. by Charles Wilkins (London: C. Nourse, 1785).
10. Warren Hastings, Letter to East India Company Court of Directors, November
3, 1772, quoted in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The
British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 26.
11. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 52.
12. Cohn, Colonialism, p. 21.
13. Sir William Jones, “A Discourse on the Institution of a Society, for Enquiring
into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences, Literature,
of Asia, By the President,” in The Works of Sir William Jones in Thirteen
Volumes (Delhi: Agam Prakashan, 1977), 3: p. 2.
14. Jones, “Discourse,” pp. 359–360.
15. See Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 204–259.
16. See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; repr.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) pp. 82–83.
17. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 82, p. 80.
18. See, e.g., Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 83.
19. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 8.
20. See Paine, Rights of Man, p. 51.
21. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Southey’s Colloquies,” Edinburgh Review 50
(January 1830): pp. 528–565.
22. Thomas Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education.”
23. Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of
Great Britain, particularly with respect to Morals and on the Means of Improving
it, Written chiefly in the Year 1792 (London: 1797), p. 71.
24. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging
the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
25. “You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called,
broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government,”
claimed Lord Balfour, author of the notorious eponymous Declaration of
1917; “conqueror has succeeded conqueror; one domination has followed
another; but never in all the revolutions of fate and fortune have you seen
one of those nations of its own motion establish what we, from a Western
point of view, call self-government.” Cited in Said, Orientalism, pp. 32–33.
chapter 4

The Victorians: Empire and the East

Sukanya Banerjee

In his well-known memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821),

Thomas De Quincey seeks to disprove popular perceptions about the
effects of opium. As he observes: “It is not so much affirmed as taken for
granted, by all who ever mention opium, formally or incidentally, that it
does, or can produce intoxication.”1 Taking issue with this assumption, De
Quincey states: “Now reader, assure yourself, meo periculo, that no quan-
tity of opium ever did, or could intoxicate.”2 Instead, according to De
Quincey, it is wine that “disorders the mental faculties.”3 What is signifi-
cant about these statements is not so much the information they convey
about the somnolent qualities of opium vis-à-vis wine as the confidence
and authority with which De Quincey writes them. He evidently writes
from experience and familiarity with opium. He writes with the conviction
of someone who knows of what he writes: “now reader, assure yourself …”
Indeed, given the autobiographical thrust of Confessions, which details De
Quincey’s lifelong addiction to opium, he does seem uniquely qualified to
dispense advice on opium. He of all people seems best suited to judge the
relative merits as it were of “Turkish opium” and “East Indian opium.”4
It comes as some surprise, then, that De Quincey is flummoxed by the
arrival of a Malay at his door. There is no obvious connection, of course,
between a native of the Malay Peninsula and opium (be it Turkish or East-
Indian) except that De Quincey groups them all – object and subject,
commodity and person – under the appellation of the “Orient.” Upon
recovering from his initial shock at seeing the Malay, he attempts to strike
up a conversation with the Malay (in Greek) and then hands him a bolt of
opium as a parting gift because he is certain that the Malay would certainly
know what to do with the opium: “To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that
opium must be familiar.”5 De Quincey also sees it fit to quote some lines from
the Iliad to his visitor because, of all the languages that he (De Quincey) knew,
“Greek, in point of latitude came geographically nearest to an Oriental one.”6
De Quincey’s depiction of his exchange with the Malay emblematizes, I
suggest, several salient features of the nineteenth-century staging of the

82
The Victorians: Empire and the East 83
“Orient.” For one, there is the familiar adumbration of the “Orient” as an
undifferentiated geographical swath encompassing, amongst other regions,
Turkey (where some of the opium comes from) as well as the archipelagic
realms of Southeast Asia (where the Malay presumably comes from). The
imprint of “otherness” on an undifferentiated geographic mass is of course
not a characteristic feature of the British nineteenth-century orientalism
alone.7 But what makes this discursive production of an Oriental geospace
in the nineteenth century doubly significant is that it was historically
accompanied by highly specific and involved British engagements with
the territories in question, both for purposes of political control and
expansion of trade interests.8 With reference to opium, for instance, by
the end of the eighteenth century, the English East India Company was
growing opium in the Indian provinces of Bengal and Bihar and exporting
it to China by way of correcting the trade imbalance (in which the British
were buying Chinese goods and had nothing of interest to offer the
Chinese and could therefore only pay with silver, which caused a massive
drain on the economy). In the few decades before the publication of
Confessions, in fact, the British were trying to establish the shortest trade
route between Calcutta and Canton for the speedy shipment of opium.
Establishing political influence over the Malay peninsula was critical in this
regard, for the Malay peninsula could serve not only as a conduit between
India and China but also as a base for making forays into the Southeast
Asian trading market.9
De Quincey’s bewilderment at how to interact with the Malay at a
personal level therefore contrasts sharply with the entangled political
and commercial relations between Britain and the Malay archipelago
at the political and commercial level. Interestingly, De Quincey states
that he spoke with the Malay in Greek because he did not have a
Malay dictionary or “Adelung’s Mithridates” with him.10 In other
words, De Quincey is aware of the scholarship undertaken by philol-
ogists, amongst others, who sought to provide a systemized body of
knowledge about the East. But his rendition of the Malay, by con-
trast, operates primarily along the plane of the fantastic and unreal.
Not only does De Quincey describe the Malay improbably gulping
down the entire bolt of opium that he offers to him, but in later
chapters the Malay also features in his tortured dreams. The memory
of the Malay triggers a series of dreams in which De Quincey is
transported into “Asiatic scenes” that signal “a sense of eternity and
infinity that dr[i]ve me into an oppression as of madness.”11 The
haunted and frantic tone underlying the description of the dreams
84 sukanya banerjee
contrasts sharply with the authorial control and self-assurance that De
Quincey had displayed earlier when extolling the benefits of opium.
De Quincey’s deep familiarity with an “Eastern” commodity – opium – runs
up, then, against his inability to meaningfully engage with someone from the
“East.” It is this dialectical relation – between the “Oriental” commodity and
the individual, between Britain’s expanding political and public engagement
with the “East” and a disavowal of that relation at the level of the private or
domestic, and, finally, between the sheer quantity of academic and bureaucratic
knowledge about the East and a relative unknowingness of its lived reality – that
courses through British nineteenth-century literature, marking the Victorian
attitude toward empire and the “East.” This dialectical relation variously
produces, I suggest, a lacuna or paralysis in representing the East (as in De
Quincey’s case) or, as the century progresses (and as I will outline), a marked
ambivalence or uncertainty that is also coterminous with an aggressive schema
of racial classification and difference.
In studying the full import of this dialectical relation, however, it is also
important to consider the term “Orientalism” in its more variegated sense.
This is to say, it is important to consider how Orientalist scholarship of the
nineteenth century reinscribes (and sometimes also undercuts) what we, in
the post-Saidian moment, are all-too-well-trained to detect as “orientalist”
By “Orientalist scholarship,” I refer here to the body of knowledge produced
on the orient by philologists, linguists, historians and philosophers, among
others. In delineating the discursive effects of orientalism Said powerfully
points to the effect of these knowledge-making enterprises in marking (and
making) the eighteenth-century French and British colonial endeavor (par-
ticularly in the Middle East). Following Said, we understand orientalism to
produce an authorizing discourse of “otherness” that not only casts the orient
as subordinate to the West but also situates it outside the realm of history.12
The discursive effects of this representational strategy cannot be gainsaid.
Yet, literary and cultural analysis too often draws an unbroken line between
scholarship undertaken by Orientalists over the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and its orientalist effects. As a consequence, the specificities of
Orientalist scholarship are overlooked or already spoken for when, in fact, a
closer scrutiny of their shifting contours reveals a far more knotted sense of
the imperial terrain. Thomas Trautmann draws a valuable distinction
between orientalism, as Said describes it, and the work of nineteenth-century
Orientalists, who, with respect to British India, for instance, advocated the
study of vernacular languages in opposition to the Anglicists and
Evangelicals campaigning for English (who would be orientalist in the
Saidian sense).13
The Victorians: Empire and the East 85
This is hardly to argue for the fact that Orientalist scholarship – what
Trautmann focuses on – is innocent of the orientalist effects that Said
ascribes to it. Far from it. Rather, it is to redirect attention to the valences
of Orientalist scholarship over the nineteenth century. I am particularly
interested in doing so because Orientalist scholars over the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, such as William Jones and Friedrich Max
Müller, respectively, focused quite heavily on language and linguistic
similarity by way of tracing various kinds of affiliation across racial
and ethnic groups. They limned, for instance, a common Indo-Aryan
lineage on the basis of the proximity between Sanskrit and other
European language systems. Such findings, however, ran counter to a
rigidly classificatory – and non-affiliational – schemata of racial difference
that began to take shape over the century in ways that marked the “East”
along settled notions of difference, thereby producing and justifying
strategies of imperial rule that belied cherished ideals of British liberalism
that were otherwise vaunted as the moral guarantor of the nineteenth-
century imperial project.14
Significantly, much of the discussion on racial difference – at least in the
mid-century – was conducted in venues provided by newly professionalized
disciplines, such as anthropology. These anthropological discussions should be
of interest to scholars of literary and cultural studies not just because they give
shape to Victorian discussions of race but also because Victorian literature
often provided an articulation of or catalyst for what was being tested or
established as anthropological theory.15 Analyzing any process of knowledge
formation requires us to pursue a multidisciplinary perspective anyway, but,
given the status of anthropology as an emergent disciplinary field in the
mid-Victorian period, it is particularly apropos to place its findings alongside
our reading of literary texts of the period. What we find coursing through both
kinds of material is an engagement with O/orientalism (in both senses of the
term, as I have described) that helps account for the liberal attitude to empire –
one that can be described (if benignly) in terms of an ambivalence – as well as
its limits.
In what follows, therefore, I highlight certain characteristics of Victorian
literature – formal and thematic – that exemplify what I describe as the
liberal ambivalence. In tracing the logic of difference and reinscription that
sustains this ambivalence, I conclude with a detailed reading of an intel-
lectual exchange that took place in 1866 under the aegis of the Ethnological
Society, London, namely Dadabhai Naoroji’s address to the society, titled
“Observations on Mr. John Crawfurd’s Paper on the European and Asiatic
Races.” Naoroji’s lecture was in response to a paper, “On the Physical and
86 sukanya banerjee
Mental Characteristics of the European and Asiatic Races of Man,” that
had been presented earlier by John Crawfurd, president of the Ethnological
Society. Studying this exchange, I suggest, affords a more granular view of
the interplay of orientalist assumptions in the nineteenth century. Besides
helping account for the crystallization of certain orientalist attitudes both
in literature and other cognate venues, the exchange also shines a light on
Naoroji (an Indian politician and academic who lived in England for much
of his life) as a colonial interlocutor, a figure who barely gains recognition
within the discursive framework of orientalism or even in Said’s exhaustive
exegesis of it. By including Naoroji within the discussion, my aim is to go
above and beyond the frame of what an orientalist system of representation
proffers. This is to say, by tracing Naoroji’s negotiation with the precepts
of contemporary Orientalist scholarship, it is also to include him – given
his political status as a British subject – within the appellation of
“Victorian,” a term whose geoethnic limits would otherwise seem to
preclude such a labeling in ways that can only be considered orientalist
in both conception and effect.

Empire, “orientalism,” and Liberal Ambivalence

In Culture and Imperialism, Said contends that nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Britain’s imbrication with empire manifests itself most
visibly in the literary structure of its novels.16 To be sure, colonial objects,
peoples and monies regularly intrude into the pages of Victorian novels (as
indeed did the Malay in De Quincey’s confessional memoir). But more
than an extraneous or incidental presence, the empire (formal and infor-
mal) very often accounts for the very plot structure of the novel. Therefore,
we have novels, such as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and William
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), in which the traffic with the colonies (the
Caribbean and India, respectively) plays an overt role in the development
of the plot. We also have the mid-century “industrial novels,” such as
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times
(1854), that explicitly deal with the social inequities fostered by industrial-
ization within nineteenth-century Britain but that look to the colonies
(Canada in Mary Barton and an unnamed colonial location in Hard Times)
by way of resolving tensions in the plot.
The empire, in other words, is ubiquitous in Victorian literary produc-
tion. Britain’s imperial outposts in the “East” – howsoever broadly ima-
gined – play a particularly instrumental role in the development of the
bildungsroman, a popular genre given the period’s emphasis on individual
The Victorians: Empire and the East 87
growth, professionalization and self-development. After all, as Benjamin
Disraeli pointed out in Tancred (in what Said appends as an epigraph to
Orientalism): “The East is a career.” Not only did the East provide a ready
avenue for young men from the burgeoning middle class, but it also
afforded a valuable route for female self-development and professionaliza-
tion.17 Postcolonial scholarship, in fact, has taken the Victorian novel to
task for the highly uneven relation that it charts between the development
of the subject position of the Englishwoman vis-à-vis her colonial/Eastern
counterpart.18 It bears mentioning that the Victorian novel does not do
much overall by way of enhancing the subject position of colonial subjects,
a point I will come to later. But what I do want to point to for now is how,
when the “East” becomes the point of reference, an awareness of the
realities of imperial ambition often intersects with growing anthropological
scrutiny as well as a liberal guilt to produce a particularly charged repre-
sentation that vacillates between familiarity and unknowing, veering
between a realist portrayal and one of unfathomable excess. This is as
true of Victorian novels as it is of travelogues, adventure tales or missionary
narratives over the course of the century. Therefore, even as De Quincey’s
Confessions is, strictly speaking, not a Victorian text inasmuch as it was
published sixteen years before Victoria ascended the throne, it nonetheless
relays – howsoever presciently – the ambivalence and uncertainty that
provides the undertone for Victorian depictions of empire.
Nowhere is the ambivalence of Victorian imperialism more evident than
in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868). Serialized a year after the passage
of the Second Reform Act, which expanded the franchise in England and
Wales, the novel works through “domestic anxieties” as well as imperial
tensions, underlining how a study of what constitutes an “orientalist”
mode of representation can hardly ignore the internal fractures rivening
Victorian society. The novel famously opens with a Prologue that is set in
India; the opening scene relays the storming of Seringapatam, the capital of
the native state of Mysore, by English soldiers. During the raid, the English
forces plunder the palace of the local ruler, Tipu Sultan, who had until
then stubbornly held out against the British. The triumph over Tipu in
Seringapatam (he was killed in this operation) was cause for celebration
amongst the British, and the Prologue captures the celebratory mood
running high among the English soldiers in Tipu’s palace. While the events
surrounding the capture of Seringapatam rely on historical accounts,
Collins overlays this historical retelling with a fictive plot.
The narrator of the Prologue, who is part of this English expedition, is
skeptical of the actions of the jubilant English soldiers, including those of
88 sukanya banerjee
his cousin, John Herncastle, who slays an Indian guardsman in order to
take possession of a fabled Indian diamond, the Moonstone. The gem,
which originally adorned an Indian deity in the temple city of Somnath,
had made its way to Tipu’s palace through a complicated history that
already involved military conquest and theft on the part of various local
Indian armies. Herncastle’s theft of the Moonstone from the dying hands
of a guardsman protecting the jewel therefore only adds further to this
already-checkered history. But in the narrator’s eyes, it implicitly takes
away from a sense of English probity and decorum.19 The narrator
renounces all connection with Herncastle, who, for his part, has the
Moonstone transported to England, where he bequeaths it to his niece,
Rachel Verinder. As it happens, the Moonstone is stolen (again) from
Rachel’s bedroom on the night of her twenty-first birthday.
From this point on, the novel devolves into a detective story (in fact,
Inspector Cuff, the detective assigned to investigate the theft, is usually
credited with being the one of the first detectives in English literature). The
fact that it is a detective plotline, one that subjects everyone to doubt and
interrogation, that drives a story with a strong “colonial” element is
significant because a detective plotline preempts any easy assumptions
about culpability and wrongdoing.20 From an early point, the needle of
suspicion falls upon three Indians who mysteriously arrive in England and
are rumored to be Brahmin priests sworn to protect the sacred diamond
even at the cost of their lives. Apparently, they had followed the diamond
to Tipu’s palace as well and had journeyed to England, determined to
restore the gem it to its rightful place, the shrine in Somnath. Given their
mysterious appearance in the English countryside soon after the diamond’s
disappearance from Rachel’s bedroom, it is assumed that they are the ones
responsible for the disappearance of the diamond. But the detective plot
counters what would be a colonialist (orientalist?) framing – “colonialist”
inasmuch as the Indians are depicted in terms of their untrustworthiness
(they appear disguised as jugglers, which does nothing to shore up their
credibility) and fanaticism (they would retrieve the diamond even at the
cost of their lives). Rather, detective protocol redirects attention away from
the Indians, focusing it on the English characters as well.
In fact, the detective plot gains momentum only because the reader is
presented with a plethora of motives – on the part of the English characters
– for stealing the diamond. What emerges, therefore, is a deeply fractured
sense of “Englishness,” one that is riven apart by class and gender inequi-
ties. Such a view puts paid to an observation made by a central character in
the novel, that it is the accursed diamond – and the interlopers that it
The Victorians: Empire and the East 89
introduces upon the English scene (the Indian jugglers) – that undermines
what is an otherwise wholesome and settled English domestic order pre-
mised on assumptions of rationality, justice and propriety (p. 38). Rather,
as it turns out, the Moonstone serves more as a catalyst that exposes the
flawed premise of an Englishness idealized along those lines. Among other
things, it becomes clear that the diamond had been stolen from Rachel’s
bedroom by none other than her fiancé, Godfrey Ablewhite. Although
several characters in the novel hail Ablewhite as a paragon of virtue, the
novel shines a light on his morally dubious dealings, which in turn bespeak
acute class and gender tensions besetting English society.21
Given that the novel explicitly absolves the Indians from any wrong-
doing and that, within its narrative frame, the diamond is actually stolen
on two occasions by Englishmen – Herncastle and Ablewhite – one could
surmise that The Moonstone presents an indictment of British colonial
ventures.22 It is important to register this self-indictment. At one level,
the indictment underlines a prevalent unease about colonial actions, an
unease that had already manifested itself a few years earlier during the
controversy surrounding Governor Eyre’s imposition of martial law in
Jamaica in 1865 in the aftermath of the uprising at Morant Bay.23 At
another level, it adds an introspective and self-incriminatory undertone
to the novel, opening up a more composite – and even contingent – sense
of Victorian Englishness. This alternate presentation of Englishness as it
were is significant inasmuch as it deflects from any monolithic sense of a
colonizing order, an overriding perception that the Victorians may well
have tried to foster and that subsequent critical formulations often tend to
overlay on the colonial equation as well.24 In that respect, the fissured
English backdrop of the novel relays the cultural context through which,
historically, transimperial solidarities were forged along alliances of labor
and gender over the course of the century, alliances that often belied
orientalist assumptions of “otherness” but never completely eschewed
some of its ethnocentric assumptions.25
In fact, even as The Moonstone affords glimpses of what can be termed as
a liberal ambivalence toward empire, it is worth noting the highly orien-
talist framing of its final scene. Transporting us to the temple in the holy
city of Somnath, India, the novel ends with a description of the deity that is
now resplendent with the diamond that has made its way back to its
rightful place. Order, it seems, has been restored. But one cannot help
but think of another kind of order that is also restored by the end of the
novel. If The Moonstone allowed for introspection and critique of Victorian
attitudes toward its Eastern colonial possessions, then the conclusion of the
90 sukanya banerjee
novel does not do much to displace familiar tropes for representing the
East. Seemingly satisfied with the fact that the Moonstone has made its way
back to “its wild native land” (p. 482), the novel ends with a panoramic
view of multitudinous Indians thronging the shrine in rapt adoration of
the deity: “tens of thousands of human creatures, all dressed in white,
stretching down the sides of the hill, overflowing into the plain” (p. 481).
Nothing much, it seems, has changed from De Quincey’s orientalist
dreams, which led him to comment nearly fifty years previously: “South
Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most
teeming with human life.”26 But even as the tenor of both those statements
is the same, it is important to contextualize The Moonstone’s ending
because it is indicative of what was actually a shift – rather than continua-
tion – in the nineteenth-century political and cultural attitude toward
empire and the East.
Aggregated into an undifferentiated mass, the Indians, as The Moonstone
ultimately has us believe, can only be cast in terms of an extraordinary –
almost fanatical – religious outpouring that obviates any question of
judicial or political claim-making (on the part of the Indians) that the
theft of the diamond from Tipu’s palace may have occasioned. The liberal
ambivalence of the novel, in other words, is held in check by a refusal or
inability to view colonial subjects (here, Indians) in anything but their
political nonage. This is a characteristically paradoxical feature of Victorian
liberalism that otherwise placed great faith in reform and improvement,
objectives that underwrote its “civilizing mission,” especially in dependen-
cies such as India.27 But by 1861, liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill
noted that, while there were colonial dependencies “whose population is in
a sufficiently advanced state to be fitted for representative government,”
there were others “which have not attained that state, and which, if held at
all, must be governed by the dominant country.”28 The consequence of
pronouncements such as these varied from the withholding of rights of
self-determination from colonial subjects to justification of acts of vio-
lence. What is significant for our purposes is to note the extent to which
various axes of representation – literary, anthropological – played a critical
role in sustaining this liberal paradox, a point that remains understudied in
Uday Mehta’s otherwise influential thesis on Victorian liberal attitudes
toward empire.
The point to bear in mind about The Moonstone in this context is that,
even as it views the Indians as driven only by religious superstition, the
novel is written well after the Indian Uprising of 1857, the so-called Indian
Mutiny, in which Indian soldiers of the British regiments had rebelled
The Victorians: Empire and the East 91
against their officers. The native discontent against the British stemmed
from social, economic and political factors and resonated amongst various
sections of the populace in India.29 While the rebellion was underway,
Charles Dickens reacted to the news of the events with some agitation:
The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement (not
in the least regarding them as if they lived in the Strand, London, or at
Camden Town) should be to proclaim to them […] that I should do my
utmost to exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the cruelties
rested.30
The events of the uprising were to haunt the Victorian imaginary for at
least the next several decades, as evidenced by the veritable industry of
“mutiny literature” that it inspired.31 Even as the novels mostly focus on
the events of the Mutiny, what remains largely overlooked in this sub-
stantive corpus, much of which was written well after the uprising had been
quelled, is the new political status granted to Indians in the aftermath of
1857. After sanctioning severe counterinsurgency measures against the
“rebels,” the British Parliament had also abolished the tenure of the East
India Company, and British Indian territories were formally brought
under the rule of the British monarch. In 1858, the Queen’s
Proclamation stated:
It is our further Will that, so far as may be Our Subjects, of whatever Race or
Creed; be freely and impartially admitted to Offices in our Service, the
Duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability, and
integrity, duly to observe.32
While the issuance of the Proclamation had more to do with curtailing the
powers of the East India Company and its trade monopoly, it had a
revitalizing effect on Indians. An emergent class of English-educated
Indians viewed it as the “Magna Carta” for demanding political rights
and a measure of parity with their imperial brethren.33
Victorian literary production over the rest of the century, however, was
unable or unwilling to cast this new variant of the Indian subject. Rather,
Indians were cast in terms of irredeemable difference (as marked in
Dickens’ outburst that differentiates between the “Oriental race” and
those who live in the “Strand”), a template that marked a shift in colonial
policy-making as well.34 To be sure, Indians featured quite visibly in a
variety of literary genres. But in all cases, they were, by and large, cast in
terms of a difference that was articulated primarily as stasis: they were cast
as unchanging types, not as individuals who, as historical agents, could
evolve to occupy different subject positions. This may well seem a familiar
92 sukanya banerjee
observation, and it does echo Said’s astute comment that the tense that is
most commonly employed for the Orient is “timeless eternal,” for which it
is “frequently enough to use the simple copula is.”35 However, it is
important to also consider how and why unchangeability becomes the
trait attributed to the East/India at a particular historical moment. Doing
so not only explains how such a characterization garners resonance at any
given time, but it also sheds light on the interlocking conversations that
allow for “difference” to be inscribed as “stasis.”
I turn attention, then, to a discussion that took place in 1866 at the
Ethnological Society, London, between Dadabhai Naoroji and John
Crawfurd. Following through the discussion highlights how nineteenth-
century Orientalist discourse variously produces orientalist effects, parti-
cularly the kind Said describes above, in ways that have as much to do with
exigencies and dilemmas of liberal colonial governance as with metropol-
itan anxieties about race, the status of science, and the professionalization
of academic disciplines.

Anthropological Difference and “Orientalist” Scholarship

Born in Bombay in 1825, Dadabhai Naoroji was the first Indian to be
appointed to a professorship in a prominent college when he was named
Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Elphinstone College,
Bombay. Traveling to England in 1853, he lived there for the next fifty years
and became the first Asian to be elected to the British Parliament in 1893
(for Central Finsbury). Naoroji was deeply immersed in the political and
intellectual life of the imperial metropolis, so it is no surprise that he took it
upon himself to provide a rebuttal to John Crawfurd, president of the
Ethnological Society, who had dwelt at some length on the inferiority of
Asiatic races in a paper that he presented before the society, “On the
Physical and Mental Characteristics of the European and Asiatic Races of
Man” (February 13, 1866).36
Crawfurd’s deliberations on Asiatic races reflected a preoccupation with
non-European people that had pervaded metropolitan discourse along
several registers from the early decades of the nineteenth century. While
much of this interest was entwined with evangelical interests, debates on
abolitionism and colonial expansionism, there was an increasing interest,
also, to study non-European people from an anthropological perspective.
The remarkable success that anthropology was to command in the latter
decades of the century often obscures its vexed origins. The
Anthropological Society that was founded in 1863 was in fact a splinter
The Victorians: Empire and the East 93
group of the Ethnological Society. Founded in 1843, the Ethnological
Society attempted to study non-European peoples from a more scientific
perspective, in contrast to associations formed even earlier, such as the
Aborigines Protection Society, which studied non-European peoples from
a more humanitarian – rather than scientific – focus. Even as the
Ethnological Society was instituted with very different objectives than
the Aborigines Protection Society, it shared the liberal humanitarian belief
in monogeneism – the concept of a single, shared origin and, hence, a
fundamental unity of all races, a belief that was strongly propounded by
James Prichard, one of the leading figures of the Ethnological Society.
The findings of the Ethnological Society were cast in a more “liberal”
frame, emphasizing the modifiability of racial difference and historical
factors as a determining feature of a scientific racial typology. Several
members of the Ethnological Society, who were led by figures such as
James Hunt, however, departed from a monogeneistic belief. Instead, they
advocated a polygenism, which, basing itself on the premise of a funda-
mental difference between races, emphasized physical and anatomical
factors that proved the insurmountability of racial difference. Such an
emphasis reoriented the study of race, inaugurating a “race science” that
was to exert significant influence over the rest of the century.
That this shift closely paralleled the response to major colonial upheavals
of the nineteenth century is perhaps not a coincidence. The 1857 uprising
in India as well as Governor Eyre’s suppression of a native uprising in
Jamaica in 1865 witnessed, as already mentioned, a rethinking of the liberal
belief in the efficacy of colonial reform and improvement, which had been
premised earlier on an understanding of the unity of races. In fact, in 1866
(the year of Crawfurd and Naoroji’s address), James Hunt addressed the
Anthropological Society with the observation that “[t]he merest novice in
the study of race-characteristics ought to know that we English can only
successfully rule either Jamaica, New Zealand, the Cape, China, or India,
by such men as Governor Eyre.”37
Crawfurd’s paper dwelt at length on the inferiority of Asiatic races when
compared to their European counterparts. The chief criterion for Crawfurd’s
pronouncement was that of progress. The notion of progress – the leitmotif
of the nineteenth century – commands double importance in the context of
Crawfurd’s address. One, it reflects the importance accorded to ideas of
development in a post-Darwinian climate in which racial difference was
explained in terms of a secular evolutionary model that sought to explain
why, although mankind was one in origin, “not all groups had progressed to
the same level.”38 Second, the idea of a graded progress was also mutually
94 sukanya banerjee
constitutive of liberal political thought, which, caught between a commit-
ment to universal equality and the need to justify its own interventions in the
context of empire, postulated a civilizational hierarchy, wherein different
races were perceived to be situated along different stages of develop-
ment, such that those who were deemed to be “backward” legitimated
England’s civilizing mission to bring them in alignment with a pro-
gressivist “present.”39 Crawfurd’s address hinged on this notion of
progress, one that entwined scientific thought with liberal ideology.
But what is also of interest is the way in which Crawfurd presented
the idea of progress itself. Unlike many contemporary scientific find-
ings, which located “other” civilizations in an anterior stage of devel-
opment, Crawfurd, betraying perhaps his schooling in Prichardian
ethnology, located Asian civilizations otherwise.
Prichard, influenced strongly by the philological theories of Orientalist
scholars, such as Max Müller and William Jones, had advocated the
primacy of the comparative study of languages over that of physical
characteristics. In this reckoning, the proximity of Sanskrit with
European languages resulted in Indians and Europeans coming off as
“long-lost” brothers, whose consequent estrangement seemed to provide
the guiding motive for philological and even ethnological study. But the
place of a language-based study in the scientific examination of race came
under duress in the mid-century. The rising prominence of anthropology
provided a compelling alternative, especially because the increasing pro-
fessionalization of science demanded a very different mode of scientific
investigation. The Ethnological Society shared in fact an uncertain rela-
tionship with the British Association for the Advancement of Science
(BAAS), the regulating body responsible for professionalizing the pursuit
of science. Structurally divided into a number of “sections,” the intellectual
and methodological preferences of the Association can be gauged by the
implicit ranking of the “sections”: Section A, devoted to physical and
mathematical sciences, claimed substantial funds and attention, while a
field like ethnology had to jostle to even gain recognition from the BAAS.40
In this context, it is significant that Crawfurd’s paper reveals a transition
from Prichardian ethnology to a study of race based on visible, physical
characteristics. Evidently, this was by no means a smooth transition:
beginning with a summary description of the physical characteristics of
Europeans vis-à-vis Asiatics – “the limbs of the European are larger than
those of the Asiatic, more especially the hands” – Crawfurd seems com-
pelled to concede that “the differences in the intellectual and moral
qualities of the European and Asiatic races are of far more importance
The Victorians: Empire and the East 95
than those in their mere bodily structures, and deserve to be considered at
greater length.”41
Such a move was perhaps prompted not just by his grounding in a
certain kind of ethnology (albeit one that was fast losing ground) but also
in his own extensive work on the languages, especially Malay, of the
Southeast Asian archipelago. It was perhaps as a result of both of these
influences that Crawfurd presented a view of the Asiatic races that was
reluctant to fully locate them in an anterior stage of development. Rather
than positing the backwardness of Asiatic races, therefore, Crawfurd high-
lights the remarkable facility with which Asiatic races “emanated sooner
from savagery and barbarism than the European”(p. 60). Having granted
the “precociousness” of Asiatic races, however, Crawfurd points to their
subsequent stagnation: “having reached a certain point of civilization,” as
Crawfurd notes, the Asiatic’s “progress becomes nearly stationary” (p. 60).
It is this idea of stasis that provides the narrative framework for
Crawfurd’s thesis. While he foregrounds the accomplishments of Asiatics
in fields as diverse as agriculture, sculpture and textile manufacturing, among
many others, he punctuates each of these observations with a statement
regarding their subsequent lack of progress. With reference to metallurgy, for
instance, he notes that while it was in Asia that the “art of making iron
malleable” was first invented, “it is probably at present nearly what it was
when first discovered, and there is not a hundred weight of good malleable
iron in all Asia, which is at present supplied from Europe” (p. 62). And by
way of illustration, Crawfurd records how British attempts at educating
Indian natives were stymied by the fact that while native students made more
progress than European students in the early years, they failed to make much
progress upon attaining puberty (p. 60). It is observations such as these that
build toward Crawfurd’s overarching argument, which he states in the final
paragraph: “the inevitable conclusion to which we must come is that
between the European and the Asiatic races of man there is a broad innate
difference, physical, intellectual, and moral” (p. 81). Not only does Crawfurd
problematically conflate the physical with the intellectual and moral, but, by
applying a somewhat circular logic, he projects his observations backward in
time as well, making them at once the cause and effect of racial difference:
“such difference has existed from the earliest authentic records,” he states,
“and is most probably coeval with the first creation of man” (p. 81).
It is not surprising, then, that the Asiatic potential for development is key
to Naoroji’s counterargument. Ironically, he counters Crawfurd’s pro-
nouncements of Asiatic inferiority by urging the Ethnological Society to
establish a more scientific mode of inquiry. In doing so, he addresses the
96 sukanya banerjee
anxieties of the Society, which in the preceding decades had to ward off
allegations that its humanitarian concerns would “compromise the pursuit
of ‘pure science.’”42 Held in suspicion, in fact, by the BAAS, the London
Ethnological Society secured grudging approval upon the understanding
that it would concentrate its resources toward documentation of data
alone.43 Crawford’s observations, Naoroji felt, suffered from the flaws
attending the reports of most foreign travelers and investigators, namely
that of “superficial observation and imperfect information” (p. 127).44 By
contrast, Naoroji refers to the work of contemporary scholars attesting to the
scientific and cultural legacy of Asiatic civilizations, especially that of India.
The paper makes extensive use of references from William Jones and Max
Müller and even reproduces extracts from Hindu and Persian scriptures.
Naoroji is also careful to assert the importance of firsthand evidence pre-
sented by contemporary Indians, including himself. Questioning the admis-
sibility of European testimony as the indubitable standard of judgment, he
points out, rather tongue-in-cheek, “If such evidence as Mr. Crawfurd relies
upon to be conclusive as to the character of the natives of India, I do not see
[how Indian conclusions] cannot be also admitted as proved” (p. 142). As he
argues further, European judgment of non-European cultures is flawed by
the fact that “every wrong act of the native is at once condemned as innate in
the native,” whereas “similar acts of Europeans are of course only individual
delinquencies, or capable of explanation!” (p. 144).
But the thrust of Naoroji’s response is his emphasis on the potential for
reform. He counteracts Crawfurd’s claims of Indian inferiority by stating
that the present state of Indian disarray was just an aberration resulting
from centuries “of foreign rule and oppression” but could be remedied by
“British rule rightly administered” (p. 144). The implicit faith in the
benevolence of British rule is not surprising at this point, given that it
constituted a key principle of India nationalist thought until well into the
twentieth century. But it is interesting to note how Naoroji recasts British
presence in India as “not foreign.” Rather, contrary to an increasingly
biologized study of race (the Anthropological Society soon advocated
anthropometric methods to study race), he reiterates a more affiliative
relationship with the British, displacing the study of physical character-
istics by alluding to the theory of common Indo-European origin, a
favored position of the language-based Orientalists. He questions
Crawford’s premise that “because there is a diversity in the intellectual
and physical character of various nations, they must therefore have separate
origin.” For Naoroji, such a premise does not hold ground. While making
such a claim, though, he is quite circumspect, refusing to be drawn directly
The Victorians: Empire and the East 97
into the heated debate about polygenesis versus monogenesis: “I do not
mean to undertake here,” he stated, “the solution of the most difficult
problem of the unity or plurality of races” (p. 147). But even as he explicitly
leaves the matter in the balance, for all practical purposes he outlines an
argument that reinforces the notion of a common Aryan origin that had
been proposed by comparative philologists.45 His paper refers not only to
India’s classical past but finds in it enough evidence of its shared racial
heritage with Europe and England: “enough has been ascertained,” he
pronounces, approvingly citing the scholar Horace Wilson, “to determine
the actual existence in Sanscrit … of a very extensive literature of fiction, in
which many of our European acquaintances are at once to be recognized”
(p. 131). And it is this filiality that for Naoroji disproves not only the case for
“innate difference” but also its concomitant charge of India’s irremedi-
ability (and unchanging nature).
With reference to Naoroji’s address, C. A. Bayly notes that the singling out
of the idea of “innate difference” by “an Indian intellectual in 1866 is strik-
ing.”46 Farsighted as it may have been, Naoroji’s contribution of course did
not in any way alter the path that metropolitan science was to pursue. But his
navigation of the terrain of metropolitan knowledge production, especially
about the East, reveals its highly contested nature, a feature that perhaps
affords a polemical entry point for Naoroji even as it orientalizes him.

O/orientalism
The concluding scene of The Moonstone is narrated to us by a Mr.
Murthwaite, who has traveled widely in the East and is the source of “expert
knowledge” on India in the novel. In his familiarity with several “Eastern”
languages as well as his emphasis on the timelessness of Hindu customs (as he
sees practiced in Somnath and what he sees as guiding the three priests in the
novel), Murthwaite could in many ways be a fictional Crawfurd (who also
knew six languages and had spent considerable time in India and Southeast
Asia). It is important, in fact, to track the presence of the Orientalist figure
across a number of registers, if only to understand the cumulative effects of
nineteenth-century orientalist discourse. It is more important to do so
because Naoroji’s intervention in itself did not, as already mentioned, have
much effect on the direction that metropolitan race science was to take. Yet,
if Naoroji is able at all to dislodge certain aspects of Crawfurd’s argument, it
is significant to note the extent to which he refers to the work of Orientalists
such as Max Müller and William Jones. In reading his address, one can, on
the one hand, hardly be unmindful of the damaging and exclusionary effects
98 sukanya banerjee
of the Indo-Aryan lineage that Naoroji configures even if in recompense.47
On the other hand, by keeping in mind the various strands and circuits of
Orientalist scholarship that Naoroji’s address points to, one is able to
disaggregate that scholarship in ways that go some distance in understanding
the complexities of how Victorians conceived of the “East” in the heyday of
liberal imperialism and, regrettably, in understanding the staying power of
that orientalist perception as well.

Notes
1. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (London:
Penguin Books, 1971), p. 73.
2. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 73.
3. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 73.
4. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 72.
5. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 91.
6. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 91.
7. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Viking Books, 1978), p. 58.
8. See John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,”
The Economic History Review 6:1 (1953): pp. 1–15. And, more, recently, John
Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013).
9. Sanjay Krishnan, “Opium and Empire: The Transports of Thomas de
Quincey,” boundary 2 33:2 (Summer 2006): pp. 204–234, p. 211.
10. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 91. Jean Christophe Adelung, an eighteenth-
century German philologist, was the author of Mithridate, or a Universal
Table of Languages.
11. De Quincey, Confessions, pp. 108–109.
12. Said, Orientalism, passim.
13. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997), p. 23.
14. See Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: Study in Nineteenth Century Liberal
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
15. For an articulation of the relation between literature and anthropolo-
gical theory in the Victorian period, see Kathy Psomiades, “The
Marriage Plot in Theory,” Novel: A Forum in Fiction 43:1 (Spring
2010): pp. 53–59.
16. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 62.
17. See, for instance, G. O. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (London:
Macmillan, 1866). For a historical account of Englishwomen looking to the
East for validation of their professional status, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens
of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
The Victorians: Empire and the East 99
18. The most compelling and incisive critique of this phenomenon remains the
one offered by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in “Three Women’s Texts and a
Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12:1 (1985): pp. 243–261.
19. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p. 7.
All references are to this edition, and further citations will be included in
parentheses within the text.
20. For a different but important argument about the significance of the detective
genre to the Victorian imperial project, see Caroline Reitz, Detecting the
Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2004).
21. I refer here to the condition of the unmarried, working-class woman as
exemplified by Rosanna Spelman in the novel. I also refer to Ablewhite’s
status as a parvenu, a position that exposes him to class snobbery, which,
amongst other things, arguably fosters a socially destructive streak in him.
22. For an account of Collins’ more critical stance on Britain’s response to the
Indian Uprising of 1857, see Maria Bachman, “Charles Dickens, Wilkie
Collins, and the Perils of Imagined Others,” in Fear Loathing, and Victorian
Xenophobia, eds. Marlene Tromp, Maria Bachman and Heidi Kaufman
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013), pp. 101–123.
23. Governor Eyre’s invocation of martial law in brutally suppressing the
“rebellion” in Jamaica evoked sharply divided responses in England. The
Jamaica Committee, consisting of men like John Mill, T. H. Huxley,
Charles Darwin, Henry Fawcett and John Bright, condemned the violation
of liberal principles, while John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle
and Charles Dickens were among those who argued for his action on
grounds of imperial expediency. For details of this uprising, see Sarah
Winter, “On The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the Governor
Eyre-George William Gordon Controversy, 1865–71,” in BRANCH:
Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco
Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, www.bran
chcollective.org/ (accessed March 7, 2017).
24. Orientalism has also been read as offering a monolithic view of the European/
colonial social order. See Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British
Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), chapter 1.
25. See, for instance, Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought,
Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006).
26. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 108. For a related reading of the conclusion of
The Moonstone, see Ian Duncan, “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and
Imperialist Panic,” Modern Language Quarterly 55.3 (September 1994)
pp.297-319, 303.
27. See Mehta, Liberalism and Empire.
28. John Stuart Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government [1861],” in
On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991): pp. 205–470, p. 453.
100 sukanya banerjee
29. There are numerous accounts of the uprising, but a standard account of the
rebellion from the Indian perspective has long been R. C. Majumdar, The
Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963).
30. Charles Dickens, Letter to Angela Burdett Coutts, October 4, 1857, cited in
Alex Tickell, “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie
Collins, and the Limits of Colonial Government,” Nineteenth Century
Literature 67:4 (2013): pp. 457–489, p. 462.
31. See Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Christopher Herbert,
War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009).
32. Proclamation, by the Queen in Council, to the Princes, Chiefs, and People of
India (Published by the Governor-General at Allahabad, November 1st, 1858)
(London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1858), pp. 117–118.
33. See Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-
Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
34. See Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, The New Cambridge History of India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3, part 4.
35. Said, Orientalism, p. 72.
36. John Crawfurd, “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the European
and Asiatic Races of Man,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 5
(1867), pp. 58–81.
37. Cited in Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 93.
38. George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987),
p. 236.
39. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, p. 78.
40. Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackeray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1981), pp. 275–276.
41. John Crawfurd, “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the European
and Asiatic Races of Man,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 5
(1867): pp. 58–81, p. 60. Henceforth all references to this paper will be
parenthetically cited in the text.
42. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 245.
43. Morrell and Thackeray, Gentlemen of Science, p. 96.
44. Dadabhai Naoroji, “Observations on Mr. John Crawfurd’s Paper on the
European and Asiatic Races,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of
London 5 (1867): pp. 127–149. Henceforth all references to this paper will be
parenthetically cited in the text.
45. See Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), chapter 1.
46. C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism
and Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 175.
47. See Shruti Kapila, “Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and
Beyond c. 1770–1880,” Modern Asian Studies 41:3 (May 2007): pp. 471–513.
chapter 5

Orientalism and Victorian Fiction

Daniel Bivona

In this chapter, I intend to discuss not the historical accuracy or inaccuracy

of Orientalist representations in the nineteenth century but the Oriental
fantasy elements at play in British fiction in the Victorian age, the
Orientalist conventions that writers drew on for their imaginative work.
This means I distinguish between fiction set in the Orient (the genre that
stages in fictional form the complex interchanges between East and West)
and “Orientalist discourse” (a vast body of writings of multiple genres that
Said draws on in his book Orientalism: the body of work produced by
professional and amateur Orientalists). In particular, I am interested in
exploring a larger theme that gives some shape to this diverse body of
fiction or at least the canonical representatives of it: what one might call the
gradual displacement of the focus of Oriental fiction from a fascination
with Oriental object to fascination with European subject, its gradual
movement from a preoccupation with what Disraeli called the “Great
Asian Mystery” to foregrounding what I am calling “The Great
European Mystery.” That early twentieth-century British fiction focuses
intently on British character and empire, anyone familiar with the work
of Forster, Orwell, Greene and others can attest, but it is prevalent in
nineteenth-century canonical fiction set in the Orient as well.1
In fact, I will argue that a concern with dramatizing the psychological
stresses of being a member of the ruling race, what one might call the
dramatization of “Conradian interiority,” comes to mark canonical
Oriental fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
unanswerable identity question “Who is Kim?” haunts much of that
literature.2 If one treats the concept of Orientalism narrowly, then, as a
set of self-referential representations of “the East” that only purports to
represent the long engagement, both friendly and hostile, between Europe
and the Muslim world, the indubitable role of literary fantasy in shaping
constructions of the Orient comes to the foreground. Whatever one thinks
about Said’s sweeping claims, one cannot overlook the fact that the
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representation of the Orient in European literature involves the repeated
deployment of a recognizable set of tropes and fantasy elements that help to
construct the generic category of Orientalist literature. The Orient is,
among other things, a world of sexual fantasy, in its most extreme form,
a world of lustful Turks lounging about in the seraglio, repeatedly violating
young English girls who eventually learn to enjoy their violation. This is
the “pornotopic” world identified by Steven Marcus in The Other
Victorians (1966) and associated especially with the anonymously authored
pornographic novel The Lustful Turk, published in Britain in 1830.3 This
world of the seraglio is recreated, later in the century, albeit in a much more
decorous Southeast Asian setting, by Anna Leonowens, who served as
governess at the court of the King of Siam and, even later, in the mid-
twentieth century, in the musical The King and I. In British literary
discourse, one can highlight a set of diverse but popular literary representa-
tions that run from Beckford’s Vathek (1786) in the late eighteenth century
through Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam and Burton’s 1885 transla-
tion of the Arabian Nights. This is, we might say, one generic mainline of
Orientalist literature. Its influential representations offer opportunities to
readers to indulge romantic fantasy not easily admitted to in fiction set in
Europe in that time: the erotic as exotic. In discussing Orientalism in
Victorian British fiction, I will of necessity set aside literary representations
of the Far East and sub-Saharan Africa, not to mention the so-called white
settler colonies, for the purposes of analysis, even though European
imperialism engaged mightily and often with those places. Limiting our-
selves to fiction, as I propose to do here, and primarily canonical fiction,
also means necessarily suspending, for the moment at least, consideration
of the central role of travelogues and administrative memoirs that, Said
argues convincingly, were crucially important to constructing the discourse
on the East for European readers in the eighteenth through the early
twentieth centuries, from the works of Montesquieu through Fourier,
Burckhardt, Champollion, Lane, Burton and Cromer, to cite just a few
examples important to Said.
These qualifications (and the need to observe space limitations) shrink
the number of works I will discuss to a more manageable size in the
interest of focus, while causing us to put aside for the purposes of this
discussion some imperial adventure fiction (H. Rider Haggard’s King
Solomon’s Mines and She, for example) as well as a significant body of
boys’ adventure literature written by popular writers such as G. E. Henty.
In canonical fiction, Thackeray, Collins and Dickens become less useful
to my design despite the important background role of India in
Orientalism and Victorian Fiction 103
Thackeray’s and Collins’ fiction and Dickens’ representation of commer-
cial free-trade imperialism in Dombey and Son and opium dens in The
Mystery of Edwin Drood (or, for that matter, opium dens in Conan
Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray). While Orientalist motifs can be found in much literature of the
Victorian era, the most significant examples of the genre tend to focus on
an imagined Muslim world running from North Africa and the Levant to
India and Southeast Asia.
For that reason, I will narrow the rest of my comments on Orientalism
and Victorian British fiction to the genre of fiction and to a few prominent
examples of mainly canonical fiction that have for their settings this
constructed Muslim world. The fictions I will discuss are generally classi-
fied as canonical (with the exception of Disraeli’s Tancred), and that
necessarily means that they exhibit generic elements found in much
Victorian Oriental fiction while also, to an extent, raising interesting
challenges to generic conventions. Indeed, that is arguably why they were
elevated to the canon. The list of works of Oriental British fiction I will
discuss here admits not only exemplary texts that engage with sexual –
particularly miscegenistic – fantasy but also works that test some generic
rules and thus come to stand out while exerting a strong fascination on
readers for years after their publication dates. These works include
Disraeli’s Tancred (1847), Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Flora Annie
Steel’s classic Mutiny tale On the Face of the Waters (1896), Rudyard
Kipling’s “Without Benefit of Clergy” (1890) and Kim (1900) and Joseph
Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899). All foreground sexuality and the violation of
European sexual norms: they test and mark out the limits of what Robert J.
C. Young calls “hybridity.” The first two link contemporary issues invol-
ving the search for cultural origins, Zionism and nationalism with the
Oriental quest. Steel’s work connects the concubinage system that pre-
vailed in India under the rule of the East India Company with the rebellion
that almost ended British rule in 1857 and 1858. Steel suggests that mis-
cegenation is the metaphorical key to understanding the ultimate failure of
the rebellion and the enforcement of rules against it the spur to a new order
of racial separation that followed the suppression of the Mutiny in 1858.4
Kipling, by contrast, was dedicated, in his Indian tales and such novels as
Kim, to offering representations of the Orient that both reinforce popular
British stereotypes of Indians and, on occasion, offer a thoroughgoing
challenge to them partly through the staging of love relationships that
involve miscegenation.5 While Kipling and Steel, despite their novelty as
writers, remain firm defenders of empire, Conrad’s convictions about
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imperialism remain more complicated. Both an enthusiast for adventure
fiction and a writer dedicated to remaking adventure fiction as a genre, a
man whose father was a leader of the Polish independence struggle against
Russia earlier in the century, Conrad, more than these other writers, clearly
is interested in the dramatic consequences of the European engagement
with an East overwritten by Orientalist conventions. In Lord Jim (1899),
the inscrutability once ascribed to what Disraeli called the “Great Asian
Mystery” has been displaced from an external space to an internal space:
essentially, onto the inscrutable European adventurer (Lord Jim). In this
fiction, the conventions of Orientalist fiction have turned away, in effect,
from a primary concern with the Oriental to focus on the European
imperialist himself who finds himself entranced by the (ultimately sexual)
spell of the Orient.

Nation, Race and Sexual Bonding

Disraeli’s Tancred and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda are unusual among novels
that engage with Orientalism in promoting a kind of nationalism that is
ultimately internationalist in scope, implicitly provincial but also cosmo-
politan.6 One might say that both make use of Zionist plots to promote a
kind of introspection that has less to do with the nature of the Orient than
with the nature of the European, albeit Europeans whose origins draw
them to the East.
The mysterious Jewish financier who makes an appearance both in
Coningsby and Tancred is Sidonia, and he often manages to distill the
ideological essence of the politician/novelist Benjamin Disraeli’s political,
cultural and religious ideas in pithy phrases. Sidonia clearly functions as a
mouthpiece for Disraeli himself, especially when he gives voice to such
aphorisms as “All is race; there is no other truth.”7 What exactly this
aphorism means, though, is worth exploring further.
In the 1840s “race” was commonly used as a synonym for what we would
now call “nation” as well as for what we would now call “color.” Much
racial theorizing of the 1840s (that is, before the publication of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species and the founding of the London Anthropological
Society [1863]) relies on both nationalist notions (the Scottish “race,” the
Welsh “race,” the Celtic “race,” the French “race”) and racial distinctions
anchored in geographic distinctions that attribute imagined, but distinct,
geographic origins to the races (“Caucasians”).8 Sometimes, linguistic
families are invoked as the identifying features – “Indo-Europeans” or
“Aryans,” “Semites,” “Hamites” – the latter two, of course, borrowing their
Orientalism and Victorian Fiction 105
names from two of Noah’s sons who helped regenerate the human race in
the aftermath of the Deluge. Often, “race” stands as a synonym for “class”
in the nineteenth century as well, especially when class is also being linked
with “blood.” Many race theorists use it this way when they refer to, for
instance, the “aristocratic” race. Arthur de Gobineau, the author of the
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–1855), mixes these class notions
with linguistic ones (he is best known for popularizing the “Aryan” race
concept, which was inspired by the work of Sir William Jones). Moreover,
the term “race” could often be deployed to designate allegiance to a faith, as
in “the Jewish race” – although Judaism is something of an unusual case,
suggesting to many non-Jewish Europeans both a legible racial identity
inscribed on an individual and an adherence to an “Asiatic” religious
practice that may not be legible on the body. However, even religious
faith offers little hope of stabilizing a proliferating category confusion.
Bayly notes that Hinduism was repeatedly misinterpreted as a “faith” along
the lines of Islam by British Orientalists when, in fact, its role in Indian life
was closer to what we now call “culture” than it was to “faith.” It was
actively being reshaped over the course of the nineteenth century in
response to pressures from other prosyletizing faiths – Islam and
Christianity in India and Southeast Asia, in particular.9 When Sidonia
claims “all is race” in Tancred, he appears to be suggesting that the concept
of race embraces a multiplicity of meanings, that its explanatory power
rests on the fact that its boundaries are ever shifting. However, Disraeli
complicates this picture by having Sidonia also tout the particularistic
superiority of the “Hebrew intellect.”10
In the last novel of his trilogy, published a year before the Chartist crisis
reached its peak, Disraeli attempts to turn his readers’ attention away from
intractable domestic issues of class in the “Hungry Forties” with which he
engaged in the two previous books of his “Condition of England” trilogy,
Coningsby and Sybil, and toward imperial adventuring as a new field for the
formation of upper-class British youth in Tancred. Tancred, the main
character, whose name is borrowed from the Crusader hero of Torquato
Tasso’s well-known romance, courts a woman named Eva and befriends
her brother Fakredeen, who is an Eastern Christian infatuated with the
goal of conquering the Levant to restore Christian predominance (“con-
quest” is often presented as “restoration” in Disraeli’s fiction and political
writings). As in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), which owes something to
Disraeli’s novel even though Eliot herself largely disparaged it, Disraeli is
peddling a form of Zionism – albeit of a peculiarly Disraelian sort –
through his mouthpiece Sidonia. As I have argued elsewhere, Disraeli is
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intent on justifying a Zionist reversal of the Diaspora while refusing to
honor commonly used distinctions, such as that between Arabs and Jews,
that in the twentieth century have come to be seen as vital to delimiting the
identity of Jewishness: “The Arabs are only Jews upon horseback” is
another character’s way of putting the case in Tancred.11 The project of
reversing the Diaspora, which is clearly implied by this amalgamation of
“Semitic” and “Indo-European” races here, is arrested abruptly at the
book’s close with the arrival of Tancred’s father and mother, Lord
Montacute and his wife, who appear in Jerusalem just in time to rescue
their son from what they consider an imprudent marriage he is about to
make with Eva. Despite Eva’s metaphorical dressing as the unifying
mother of the entire human race and a figure of prominence in all three
major religious traditions with origins in the Middle East (Islam, Judaism
and Christianity), the ending reasserts, albeit somewhat lugubriously, the
predominance of British political and domestic order, as Lord Montacute
and his wife arrive in Jerusalem just in time to impose that order by
preventing Tancred’s marriage. By this act, they void any attempt to see
the entire Zionist project through because its success appears to hinge on
the marriage of the two young people. Apparently, Tancred’s planned
marriage to the reincarnated mother of the human race had to be stopped
to prevent the forging of an imprudent match – even Eve’s blood is
apparently insufficiently pure for an English aristocratic alliance.
One can easily understand George Eliot’s reluctance to celebrate
Tancred as the forerunner of her penultimate novel Daniel Deronda, as
Tancred’s artistic flaws and contradictions are all too obvious.
Moreover, the unsatisfactory ending of Tancred reasserts a somewhat
silly domestic order of power, thus converting the meaning of the
novel from a grand project of cultural syncretism to nothing but a
boys’ lark spoiled by the arrival of the adults at the end. Eliot’s
opening line in Daniel Deronda – “Men can do nothing without the
make-believe of a beginning”12 – also insinuates that a playful mean-
ing (“make-believe”) invests Deronda’s identity quest in Eliot’s novel
as well, while attributing merely instrumental motives to Deronda’s
search for his own Jewish origins, as if the goal of doing something
were simply to do something. Eliot implicitly undermines the serious-
ness of Deronda’s quest for origins precisely by suggesting that all
such quests are juvenile adventures, ultimately a form of play. One is
reminded of the ending of Middlemarch, which seems both to cele-
brate Dorothea’s “incalculably diffusive” influence on others and to
reduce her heroism to fictional “unhistoric acts.”13
Orientalism and Victorian Fiction 107
Interestingly, Eliot wrote and published Daniel Deronda during the
decade when Jewish philanthropists such as the Montefiores and
Rothschilds first sponsored the settlement of persecuted Eastern
European Jews in Palestine, a decade in which Disraeli was also serving
his longest term as prime minister. The period 1874 to 1880, in fact, saw
Disraeli’s central accomplishments as a prime minister in service of a rather
grandiose vision of empire. He buys the Suez Canal with an emergency
loan from the Rothschild Bank (1875), crowns the Queen Empress of India
(1877), dominates the room at the first Congress of Berlin, arranged by
Bismarck to re-partition the Balkan Peninsula in the aftermath of the
Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, and ultimately ensures the dominance
of imperialism in late-Victorian domestic politics by deploying it as part of
a Tory strategy for recruiting the votes of newly enfranchised working-class
males who succumb to his jingoist appeals. Of course, the Powers, by then,
include the newly risen German Empire, flush with very recent success in
its defeat of France and newly eager to share in African imperial spoils.
For all of Daniel Deronda’s comparative sophistication as a novel, it
nonetheless borrows elements from Tancred, perhaps most obviously the
use of a central prophetic figure to announce, justify and pave the way for
the Zionist project. Eliot’s Mordecai has little to do with the activities of
his namesake from the Book of Esther (who protects the Jews in exile in
Persia by revealing to the king a plot against his life), but he does assume a
prophetic role here in promoting Zionism and, in effect, prophesying the
revelation of Daniel’s Jewish identity before Daniel learns it himself from
the lips of his mother at their dramatic meeting late in the novel. The
promise of Zionism is ultimately demographic: a promise of growing
population, but one that retains racially distinctive markings.
To be sure, the novel is full of other resonances of Victorian imperialism
that have little to do with Palestine. The best example, perhaps, is Eliot’s
persistent metaphorical association of Gwendolen’s abusive husband
Grandcourt with Governor Eyre, the white British ruler of Jamaica
whose harsh treatment of rebellious blacks on the island in 1865 earned
him a well-deserved name for brutality while, nonetheless, winning him
the vocal support of Dickens, Carlyle and Ruskin, among other intellec-
tuals of the day, who were convinced that strong measures were needed to
suppress the rebellion.14 Indeed, Daniel Deronda’s two main plots – the
Gwendolen Harleth marital plot and the Daniel Deronda identity plot –
suggest that the author is deliberately juxtaposing Gwendolen’s centrifugal
rebelliousness with Daniel’s centripetal concern for return and reunifica-
tion. The ending of the novel then reveals the author’s choice of Daniel as
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her favorite when Gwendolen reluctantly surrenders all hope of marrying
Daniel as the latter reveals his Jewish ancestry and, concommitantly, his
newly affirmed and single-minded dedication to constructing a Zionist
community and ultimately a Jewish state in Palestine. That Zionism in this
novel is as much about the maintenance of cultural (or racial) distinctive-
ness as it is about the melding of different peoples together in an attempt to
reverse the diaspora becomes clear at the end of this novel through Daniel’s
choice of Mirah as his bride: a complete, if only implicit, repudiation of his
mother’s lifelong pursuit of the goal of deracination. Moreover, the histor-
ical model Daniel seizes on to clothe the proven viability of “a new stirring
of memories and hopes” in a nationalist project is a recognizably European
one: the Italian Risorgimento (p. 595). It is a model that at least begs
comparison with a project like Fakredeen’s in the Levant: one that
would, if realized, draw the disparate strands of a diasporic nation together
in a highly romantic – and, at the level of individuals, fundamentally
sexual – project of reunification and reproduction, albeit one which the
narrator finally admits has only the contingent nature of fiction. If “Men
can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning,” according to
Eliot’s narrator, then a passionate interest in returning to one’s cultural and
national origins places one in the realm of the imaginary: believing one is
returning to a homeland that has in fact never been home, while embracing
an explanation for one’s Sephardic appearance that stamps one with
racialized distinctiveness necessary to buttressing the project of a restored
Jewish state. Although the novel largely ties the distinctiveness of the Jews
less to physical traits than to the stories they tell about racial persecution,
Eliot also seems to concede, at least implicitly, the importance of racial
marking for national identity. The Zionist quest is ultimately revealed
to be a way for Deronda to carry out a plan ultimately birthed by
men – confected by Mordecai, in fact – rather than a quest to restore a
lost relationship with the person who is responsible for his biological
inheritance of Jewish origins: Deronda’s mother.

Mutiny and Miscegenation in Anglo-India

Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters, written in the mid-1890s by
an Anglo-Indian writer whose work is far too good to be kept out of the
canon, is also much preoccupied with the issue of miscegenation at the
time of the Indian Mutiny (1857–1858). Arguably the best of the “Mutiny
novels,” On the Face of the Waters is preoccupied with the miscegenistic
relations between men of the East India Company and their Indian
Orientalism and Victorian Fiction 109
concubines during the rebellion supposedly instigated by the panicked
discovery by Indian troops that an English quartermaster had ordered their
rifles to be greased with the fat of pigs and cattle.
The hero, a secret agent named Greyman (aka “Douglas”), also exem-
plifies some of the abuses of Company rule. For instance, early in the novel
he buys a concubine from a house of ill repute while first ensuring that she
has ivory skin – he refuses to buy a “dark” woman – a promise that either
marks his allegiance to European racist notions soon to be reinforced by
the Raj in the aftermath of the rebellion or reinforces the appearance of his
observing Indian caste allegiances dating from time immemorial, all in the
interest of enhancing his disguise. He redeems himself by performing
heroic acts to save the main white character, Mrs. Erlton, from death at
the hands of the mutinying sepoys. The abuses that provoke the rebellion
appear to originate in part from the behavior of Company men who have
“gone native” – i.e. failed to uphold imperial racial, religious, cultural and
power distinctions, distinctions, the author suggests, that are brutally
reasserted as the British launch a vicious counterattack against the rebel-
lious Indian soldiers.15 The novel manages both to condemn abuses such as
concubinage that the Company largely tolerates and to dramatize the
heroism of the brave white officers who, with unbridled brutality that
Steel soft-pedals, turn the tide of battle in 1858 to restore India to its role as
the distinctly subordinate Jewel in the Crown thereafter to be ruled directly
by Parliament. Indeed, the novel implicitly draws on 1890s eugenicist
preoccupations in suggesting that interracial sexual liaisons between
Indian women and British men are not only demoralizing but inherently
infertile.16 We see this when Greyman/Douglas’ concubine gives birth to a
stillborn baby early on in the novel.17 However, concubinage and other
Indian practices adopted by Englishmen also suggest a role for colonial
mimicry that undermines, fatally, the ability of all but a handful of English
to be able to read Indians. In this moment of rebellion, when loyalty
cannot be counted on, unusual behavior may well be a sign – indeed, a
signal – of mutinous intentions. In one dramatic moment early on, Alice
Gissing laughs nervously at the difficult-to-interpret spectacle of two
Indian men in whiteface and crinolines dancing while holding each other’s
waists (p. 66). This moment of ambiguous gender-blending may possibly
be a deliberate parodic mimicry of the English. Ever alert to signs with
subversive meaning, Douglas, however, steps in to calm this particular
situation by first yelling “Bravo!” aloud and then kicking the perpetrators,
who turn out to be the servants Jhungi and Bhungi, whom he knows well
(p. 68). What initially looks like subversion, in this case, is revealed to be
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play. Moments of apparent political subversion are only suppressed by the
use of a firm hand.
Moreover, Douglas himself, one of the few Englishmen who can “read”
the natives fairly successfully, makes conscious use of disguise throughout
the novel, in order to spy on Indians and to measure the progress of
rebellious sentiment. The English have grown panicked as the mutiny
spreads, and what panics them most is the thought that Hindu and Muslim
troops are communicating with one another through ambiguous signs and
across a heretofore unbridgeable religious gulf (p. 164): an apparent direct
threat to the “divide-and-rule” strategy that marked British rule both
under the Company and, after 1858, the Raj. Soon enough, Douglas dis-
covers that messages are being sent inside of chapatti, an unmistakable sign
of unprecedented coordination among Indian troops across religious lines.
As Douglas warns the Resident: “And so a scene, trivial in itself, points an
inexorable finger to the broad fact underlying all our Indian administra-
tion, that we are strangers and exiles” (p. 139).
Published in 1895, this novel may well have influenced Kipling’s later,
and more elaborate, depiction of a vast and efficient British spy network
operating in India in his novel of 1900, Kim. While that latter novel depicts
Kim rejecting the sexual overtures of a polygamous Himalayan princess
late in the book in favor of his reaffirming his homosocial allegiance to the
Lama and the Secret Service, its tone is also much different from the tone of
On the Face of the Waters. The Raj of Kim appears to be mainly a very
efficient and powerful institution which maintains firm political control of
India by recruiting soldiers, spies and intellectuals to do its bidding.18 By
contrast, the Company-ruled India of Steel’s novel is living through a
convulsive rebellion instigated largely by the deplorable cultural ignorance
of Company employees and other English figures (as well as the machina-
tions of the last Mughal emperor). The Indian characters remain largely
closed-off mysteries to the English, objects of suspect loyalty, their women
ranging from nautch girls to servants, innocent victims of sati rules,
ignorant and uneducated, the more respectable among them confined in
a deep purdah. Steel’s feminist reading of the Mutiny can be distilled from
her depiction of Indian women as in need of liberation from their own
repressive cultural traditions, their own vulnerability to the depredations of
English Company men who are “going native.”
An earlier Kipling story, “Without Benefit of Clergy” (1890), offers a
gentler and more poignant treatment of miscegenation in what is none-
theless a tragic tale of doomed love across religious and national bound-
aries. The main character, an Englishman named Holden, maintains a
Orientalism and Victorian Fiction 111
secret relationship with a young Muslim Indian woman named Ameera in
a house he owns. The house functions as a kind of Bower of Bliss, allowing
Holden to hide his love from the eyes of others, Indian and English, at a
time, presumably late in the nineteenth century, when Anglo-Indian sexual
behavior was policed by a much larger population of memsahibs (and more
vigilant Club-centered socializing) than was the case in 1858. The tale itself
is a political/geographic allegory of the Great Game as well as a love story.
Holden’s house is guarded by a loyal Afghan named Pir Khan, whose job
metaphorically connects him with all the loyal northern races (from
Ghurkas to Afghans) whose presence along with British troops at the
northern reaches, the mountain passes, offers hope of some tenuous
protection against the looming threat of Czarist Russia, then engaged in
rapid expansion across Central Asia. It is a love story containing a political
clarion call to martial vigilance and a tragic warning about the brevity of all
accomplishments, whether in war or love.
The birth of a son to Ameera and Holden teases us with the –
ultimately doomed – prospect of a successful multiracial imperial future
for India. It also dashes the hope of postponing what Ameera is convinced
will be her early death and displacement by her hated rival, a nameless
member of “the bold, white mem-log” whom she imagines dogging her
every footstep.19 After the boy is born and named “Tota,” “the Parrot,”
the story dramatizes Ameera’s increasing fears that the Bower of Bliss will
be riven after death as mother and son go to a different heaven from
Holden: a projection of India’s racial and cultural differences into the
afterlife. Ultimately, Ameera cannot be fully happy at her moment of
greatest bliss because she fears the jealousy of God (p. 238). Indeed, she
even goes so far as uttering apostasy: “There is no god but thee, beloved,”
she says to Holden on her deathbed (p. 243). Ameera’s fears are more than
fully realized toward the end of the story when “nature” decides to “audit
her accounts with a big red pencil”: English bureaucratic language for a
tragic undoing of their happiness that Ameera explains in terms of
personal jealousy. Her death by cholera follows closely on the heels of
the loss of their son, and the end of the story sees a ferocious monsoon
descend from the heavens to wash the cholera-infected land “clean” as in
the story of Noah. Kipling’s tale ends with the house demolished and no
sign left of its ever having been (p. 246).
Here miscegenation can only be understood as a tragic choice and one
that leads to sterility, albeit of a poignant variety. The lesson seems to be
that the jealousy of God, provoked by miscegenistic crossing, brings a
brutal judgment on the heads of those who would test it.
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Conrad’s Asian Lordship
Published in 1899, Conrad’s Lord Jim is a complex novel set mainly in
India and Southeast Asia. Structurally the novel is divided into two
main parts: the first involves the inquiries (the official one and the
unofficial one conducted by Marlow) into why the crew of the Patna
abandoned ship, leaving eight hundred Muslim pilgrims on the hajj
floundering pilotless in the Arabian Sea. The second concerns the
central character Jim’s multiple failures to make reparation or
straighten out his life after this failure until he finds himself a job
as the charismatic leader of a tribe of Bugis on Borneo (“Patusan”)
and ultimately dies a self-sacrificial, but tragically heroic, death at the
hands of a ruthless English pirate named Gentleman Brown, whom he
had mistakenly decided to trust. This latter part of the novel, which is
set in Borneo, is not only a highly conventional adventure tale
appropriate to the tradition of the Arabian Nights but something of
a Stevensonian boys’ novel tacked on to the end of a piece of
Conradian psychological fiction. The mixture appears to embed
Jim’s plot in two incompatible genres, the last of which is not only
highly conventional in form but loudly proclaiming its convention-
ality throughout, almost as if Conrad were daring his readers to be
moved by a piece of cheap adventure fiction, knowing full well that
they would inevitably succumb because cheap adventure fiction offers
emotional compensations denied by the nagging ambiguities turned
up by the multiple inquiries of the earlier parts of the novel. The
critics Pathak, Sengupta and Purkayastha have summarized the fabular
features of the Patusan narrative succinctly: “talismanic rings are
conferred, and save; rajahs are decadent and lecherous; coffee is
poisoned; clocks have stopped.”20 This Southeast Asian garden even
contains a “snake” in the form of Cornelius who slithers about
wherever he goes, bridging metaphorically both Arabian Nights con-
ventions and Biblical. Moreover, Conrad slathers on layers of self-
consciousness by having Marlow himself, the narrator in the tale,
remind us explicitly that we are reading a romance, as if there were
a chance we would forget and be tempted to enjoy the romance in a
state of blissful unselfconsciousness. “Remember,” he says at one
point, “this is a love story I am telling you.”21 It is a peculiar romance
nonetheless. Even Jim’s beloved Jewel seems to possess a Marlovian
self-awareness, which she demonstrates when, at one point, she pre-
dicts to Marlow that Jim will leave her because “They always leave us”
Orientalism and Victorian Fiction 113
(230). It is the pronoun “they” that gives the game away: a clear sign
that she sees herself living out an iterable plot familiar from well-
tested literary convention – she is the Oriental concubine, and deser-
tion by her lover is a generic given.
The effect is to assign to Jim’s final undoing the textualized fated-
ness of plot that is always already recognized as such, always already
known. The Jim of the first half of the novel, who failed to live up to
the inhuman expectations of the code of the sea – that he ready
himself to go down with the ship – is essentially assigned a reparative
plot by the narrator Marlow that takes the place of an explanation of
his motives. In other words, Marlow directs Jim’s actions under the
guise of explaining him. By subjecting him to a merciless inquiry in
Charley’s Restaurant in the first half of the novel, Marlow is attempt-
ing an inquisitorial “putting of the question” that, as with most
inquisitions, tends to produce “truths” of a sort, even if they are, as
here, unsatisfactory. Indeed, Marlow’s inquiry into Jim becomes an
inquiry into himself as well. As an inadvertent self-examination, it
returns no good answers:
Why I longed to go grubbing into the deplorable details of an occurrence
which, after all, concerned me no more than as a member of an obscure
body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity
to a certain standard of conduct, I can’t explain. You may call it an
unhealthy curiosity if you like; but I have a distinct notion I wished to
find something. Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find something,
some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some
convincing shadow of an excuse. (p. 43)
What Marlow’s inquisition establishes is the banal, but inadmissable, truth
that Jim jumps because he is afraid and he is afraid because he is mortal.
The rule requiring captain and crew to go down with their ships exists to
require extraordinarily heroic behavior from very ordinary men. Moreover,
to acknowledge that banal fact in public, as Brierly implicitly understands,
is to endanger the system of white rule because it signifies that what Orwell
calls the pukka sahib code is no longer embraced by the sahib.22 By simply
inquiring in public, whites expose themselves as very ordinary, very mortal
folk taking extraordinary risks. European self-examination produces no
answers worth knowing because there is nothing extraordinary about
whites, finally, but their tendency to excessive risk-taking and their ten-
dency to act as if they deserved to belong to a special club, to be “one of us.”
The well-examined interior produces no information worth knowing.
114 daniel bivona
Only the existence of external rules places them in a seemingly exalted
social position, but even that position can only be temporary (except in
adventure fiction). In deserting their beloveds, they are merely following a
script. In V. G. Kiernan’s view, it is all designed to reinforce a constructed
mystique of race that consists of nothing more than the familiar theatrical
performance of inhuman heroism:
Mystique of race was Democracy’s vulgarization of an older mystique of
class … This had an insidious attraction for muddle-headed plebeians
arriving from Europe, where on a larger scale classes were being drawn
together in brotherly harmony by a common sensation of superiority to the
lesser breeds outside; above all to plebeians from England, accustomed to
breathe an air composed of oxygen, nitrogen, and snobbery.23
That Marlow finds Jim an absorbing mystery testifies to the fact that he
privileges the mysterious interiority over the banal discovery that there is
nothing inside but the rules, which one may follow or not. That Europeans
reveal themselves to be exceptionally ordinary in everything but their
choice of desertion and death is Conrad’s ultimate contribution to under-
standing the psychology of imperial adventure. That Jim chooses to trust
Gentleman Brown at the end, thus inviting the death of Dain Waris and
Jim’s own submission to execution at the hands of his father, is both a sign
of his naivete and his willingness to live to the full the adventure hero’s
scripted fate.
Lord Jim is both absorbing Orientalist fiction and, in Jameson’s
view, an exemplary metafiction that stages a process of self-defeating
psychological introspection (Jameson pp. 206–280).24 While demysti-
fying European claims to racial superiority, it also captures the cen-
trality of racial mystique and sexual ambivalence that lay at the heart
of the imperial enterprise.

Notes
1. A Passage to India attempts to balance both in its portrayal of Aziz and Fielding.
2. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Penguin Classics, 2011), p. 118.
3. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sex and Pornography in Mid-
Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 266–286.
4. Steel’s was a complicated relationship with India. She has been referred to as
“the female Kipling” (http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/11/09/flora-
annie-steel-female-kipling/). That is, she was an outspoken critic of colonial
inefficiency (but not of empire) and managed to infuriate both the conven-
tional memsahibs she often criticized in her writings and local Indian
Orientalism and Victorian Fiction 115
authorities who were suspicious of her projects to advance the education of
Indian women. Patrick Brantlinger identifies On the Face of the Waters as
the novel about the British colonial world that comes closest to being a truly
good war novel: Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 62.
5. Joseph Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765 to 1858
(New York: Palgrave, 2011).
6. Patrick Brantlinger, “Nations and Novels: Disraeli, George Eliot, and
Orientalism,” Victorian Studies 35:3 (Spring 1992): pp. 255–275, p. 272;
Amanda Anderson, “George Eliot and the Jewish Question,” Yale Journal of
Criticism 10:1 (1997): pp. 39–61, p. 39.
7. Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred; or, the New Crusade (London: Longman,
Greene: 1880), p. 149.
8. For a more thorough discussion of the interplay of “monogenetic” and
“polygenetic” racial theories in mid-Victorian Britain, see Robert J. C.
Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London:
Routledge, 1995).
9. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004), pp. 350–351.
10. Brantlinger, “Nations and Novels,” p. 256. For a more thorough discussion of
“race” and “hybridity” in the context of “colonial desire,” see Young, Colonial
Desire.
11. Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic
Debates in Victorian Literature (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 1990), p. 7; Disraeli, Tancred, p. 253.
12. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 35.
13. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 838.
14. Sarah Winter, “On the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the Governor
Eyre-George William Gordon Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on
the Net. Web.Controversy, 1865–70,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and
Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga (accessed May 8, 2017).
15. Mytheli Sreenivas, Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal
in Colonial India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 1–15.
16. The novel identifies the ratio of white men to memsahibs as twenty to one at
the outbreak of the Mutiny; Flora Annie Steel, On the Face of the Waters: A
Tale of the Mutiny (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1896), p. 54.
17. Steel, On the Face, p. 38.
18. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 33.
19. Rudyard Kipling, “Without Benefit of Clergy,” Macmillan’s Magazine (May
1, 1890): pp. 148–160, p. 232.
20. Zakia Pathak, Saswati Sengupta and Sharmila Purkayastha, “The Prisonhouse
of Orientalism,” Textual Practice 5:2 (Summer 1991): pp. 195–218, p. 212.
21. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Jacques Berthoud (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), p. 221.
116 daniel bivona
22. Michael Greaney, “Lord Jim and Embarrassment,” Lord Jim: Centennial
Essays, eds. Allen H. Simmons and J. H. Stape (Amsterdam: Editions
Rudopi, 2003), pp. 1–14, pp. 8–9.
23. V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Humankind (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), p. 230.
24. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 194–270.
chapter 6

Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites

Christopher Hutton

Introduction
Aryanism pervades the Western intellectual tradition, emerging out of early
modern understandings of human diversity and the engagement of European
scholars with Asia, in particular Persia and then, centrally, India. While this
engagement had an extensive prehistory, the definitive encounter took place
within the context of colonialism, as part of a scholarly enterprise known,
since Edward Said’s 1978 work, as Orientalism. Writing at the beginning of
the twentieth century, Ernest Seillière defined “historical Aryanism,” exem-
plified by the work of Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), as “a philoso-
phy of history which attributes the moral and material advances of humanity
more or less exclusively to the influence of the Aryan race.”1 In the interwar
period, Frank Hankins glossed Aryanism as “historically the most influential
doctrine of racial superiority” and included among its derivatives “Celticism
in France, Teutonism in Germany and Anglo-Saxonism in England and
America.” He noted presciently that Aryanism “metamorphoses, but it
never dies.”2 Today, in the popular imaginary, Aryanism connotes above all
Nazism and its vision of a superior “Aryan race,” as well as the white
supremacism of the Aryan Brotherhood and similar far-right fringe groups.
In addition to its equivalents in European languages (Arier, aryen, aryjski,
ario, etc.) and the various etymological readings of the Sanskrit arya (e.g.
“noble” or “pure”), Aryan is part of a complex field of overlapping terms.
These include Japhetic, Caucasian, Teutonic, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, Nordic,
Homo europaeus, Germanic, Indo-Germanic, Indo-European or, simply,
white, along with ideological movements or tendencies such as Anglo-
Saxonism, Teutonism, Nordicism, Germanism or Germanicism (especially as
a translation of Germanentum), and Pan-Germanicism (Pan-Germanentum).
Aryanism also has a cultic twin, Ariosophy,3 an anti-Christian, anti-Semitic
offshoot of theosophical Orientalism. The ariosophist Guido List (1848–
1919) preferred the term Ario-Germanen, since he found Deutsch too
constraining.4

117
118 christopher hutton
European conceptions of peoples and their lineages took as their point
of departure the “Mosaic triad” of the sons of Noah, namely Shem, Ham
and Japhet (Genesis 10). According to the most popular reading, Japhet
was understood to be the ancestor of modern Europeans, Shem of the
Semites, and Ham of the Africans. Different moral qualities tended to be
attributed to these branches, and there were arguments about whether a
people and its language were “original” or “primitive” (in a positive sense)
or were merely derivative. The extraordinary depth and complexity of this
Biblical framework emerges from Arno Borst’s multivolume intellectual
history.5 The early modern period saw discourses involving “legitimizing
histories and myths which gave larger, usually politically signiﬁcant, groups
of people rights to their status, to their territory or to other privileges.”6
This Biblical model began to break down in the course of the eighteenth
century, though this was an uneven (and unﬁnished) process. The notion
of an intimate family history of mankind could no longer be sustained,
especially given new understandings of the age of earth, and evidence of the
range and historical depth of the world’s cultures. The etymological argu-
ments used to ground genealogical speculation came to be seen as unsyste-
matic and fanciful. Yet the Biblical framework provided a conceptual
model that persists to this day. “Etymological thinking,” with its key
template of the genealogical tree,7 remains fundamental to identity theo-
rizing today. The Biblical notion of Volk (ethnos) as a collectivity sharing a
common lineage, language and territory became the default setting of
global modernity.8 The terms Semitic and Hamitic are still used in aca-
demic linguistics. Japhetic, after being replaced by Indo-Germanic and
Aryan, is now referred to as Indo-European. Indo-Aryan is used to refer to
the South Asian branch of Indo-European.9

Aryanism and the German Intellectuals

The Aryan paradigm has its political origins in the struggle for German
nationhood in the aftermath of the French Revolution (1789) and during
the Napoleonic era (1799–1815). The Napoleonic order represented the first
modernizing empire, in that it imposed by conquest Enlightenment
notions of citizenship and the rule of law, symbolized in the emancipation
of the Jews. The effect on the intelligentsia of German states was traumatic.
One early response came in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832)
lyric epic Hermann und Dorothea.10 It is set in 1795 or 1796 in the area of
Mainz, where refugees fleeing French revolutionary troops have crossed the
Rhine to seek safety. The story concerns the love of a wealthy innkeeper’s
Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites 119
son, Hermann, for a maid, Dorothea, a match opposed by Herman’s
father. The natural order and enduring relation to soil of the German
rural world is juxtaposed to the chaos and deracination that characterizes
the French Revolution and its aftermath. Images of continuity and root-
edness are expressed in terms of ownership and possession, both individual
and at the level of the collectivity, the nation: “This is mine! You are mine.
And now what is mine is more mine than ever.”11
A second key text in the response to the Napoleonic conquest was J. G.
Fichte’s (1762–1814) lectures, delivered in the winter of 1807–1808 in Berlin
under French occupation. One of the founding texts of European nation-
alism, the lectures represent an aggressive assertion of cultural particular-
ism, with the German nation seen as united internally by a common
language and a common way of thinking and sharply enough distinguished
from other peoples to protect itself from foreign influence or attack.12
Fichte’s initial response to the French Revolution had come in 1793, in
the form of work aiming to rectify “public judgments on the French
Revolution.” According to Fichte, Jews were spreading throughout the
European countries in the form of “a powerful state with a hostile men-
tality,” one which exists “in a continual state of war” with their citizens.13
German nationalism suppresses at the very outset the problem of internal
difference within the Volk.14 In the absence of a political state, a fictive
unity of language, lineage and culture was projected onto an imperial
jumble of principalities and fiefdoms,15 and a population that lacked a
common mutually intelligible vernacular, even between those that spoke
some form of (what we would now refer to as) German. Experience of
French colonization entrenched a form of aggressive Romantic particular-
ism, which associated constitutionalism and modernity with the European
Jews. If an enduring relationship between soil, lineage, language and
culture is a key to modern nationalism, then anti-Semitism is its inevitable
correlate.
Interacting with this Romantic nationalism-before-the-nation was
European Orientalist scholarship, arising with new authority out of
British colonial engagement with India. Schwab celebrates what he
referred to as an “Oriental Renaissance – a second Renaissance,” an intel-
lectual revival “brought about by the arrival of Sanskrit texts in Europe,”
which produced an effect equal to “that produced in the fifteenth century
by the arrival of Greek manuscripts and Byzantine commentators after the
fall of Constantinople.”16 The key figures are Sir William Jones (1746–
1794) and Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805). Said like-
wise locates the origins of Orientalism in the late eighteenth century,
120 christopher hutton
which, in his well-known Foucaultian framing, he defines as “the corporate
institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making
statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it,
settling it, ruling over it.” It is “a Western style for dominating, restructur-
ing, and having authority over the Orient.”17 The logic of this position is
that the animating intentions and academic propositions of colonial scho-
larship are secondary in relation to the political and intellectual structures
of domination themselves.18 Islamophilia and Islamophobia are ultimately
two sides of the same Foucaultian coin.
What is distinctive in the late eighteenth century is the increasingly
formalized imperial presence in India. In the preface to his Persian gram-
mar, Jones noted that “the excellent writings of Greece and Rome” were
“studied by every man of liberal education,” whereas the works of the
Persians, “a nation equally distinguished in ancient history,” were either
unknown or “considered as entirely destitute of taste and invention.”
Lamenting the lack of support given to humanistic studies, Jones remarked
on the importance of Persian and other “languages of Asia” now that that
the British had “most extensive power” in India.19 In the same year,
Anquetil-Duperron published his pioneering three-volume translation of
the Zend-Avesta.20 Anquetil-Duperron is apparently the modern source of
the term Ariens, as a rendering of arioi from Herodotos (c. 484–c. 425
BCE), rendered into German as Arier by Johann Kleuker (1749–1827) as a
synonym for Persians or Medes (Medians).21
The conventional starting point for the modern Aryan paradigm is the
proclamation by Sir William Jones that Sanskrit was “of a wonderful
structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin,
and more exquisitely refined than either,” yet it bore to these languages
“a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar,
than could possibly have been produced by accident.” This affinity was so
pronounced that “no philologer could examine them all three, without
believing them to have sprung from some common source,” and this
affinity likely extended to include Celtic, Gothic and Old Persian.
Rather than anticipating the modern Indo-European hypothesis, Jones
described the “immemorial affinity” of the Hindus with the “old Persians,
Ethiopians, and Egyptians, the Phenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans, the
Scythians or Goths, and Celts, the Chinese, Japanese, and Peruvians.”22
Iran was the “central country” of humanity, where the three branches of
humanity with “the three primitive languages” must have first concen-
trated.23 Jones did not use the term Aryan.24 He was working within a
variant of the Biblical paradigm, within which there was long-standing
Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites 121
recognition of similarities between Asian and European languages,25 trace-
able back to the so-called Scythian hypothesis.26 Jones did not associate
Japhet with the Europeans, however.27 Through its reception by Johann
Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803),28 Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and
others, colonial scholarship triggered the ensuing “Indomania.” This
became a feature of German, even more than English or French,
Romanticism, with Georg Forster’s 1791 rendering of Jones’ Sakuntala
translation becoming an enormous hit among the German literati.29
In Paris from 1802 to 1804, Schlegel studied Persian and Sanskrit in a
milieu which included Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (1773–1832) and the
detainee naval officer Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824). He turned his back
on the modern city in order to penetrate the mysteries of ancient India.30
The result was his influential Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier.31 It
was also Schlegel who generalized the term Arier and applied it to the
ancestors of the Germans, thereby making the key conceptual link between
German nationalism and Orientalism.32 Schlegel’s concern was with the
historical grounding and lineage of the German Volk, and he is the true
founder of the Aryan paradigm in its modern, ideological sense. Aryanism
represents an act of imaginative inclusion, the paralleling of ancient India
with classical Europe by Orientalist scholars and the positioning of ancient
India as a point of origin. But this inclusion was primarily the appropria-
tion of a set of texts and an associated language.
This period shows the origins of “revolutionary anti-Semitism,” within
which ideas of German national liberation and salvation were inextricably
bound up with mistrust and hostility toward the European Jews.33 As in
Said’s model, the distinction between liberal assimilationism (under which
Jews would be granted civic equality but in the expectation that this would
lead to their disappearance as a distinct social group) and eliminationist
hostility is less significant than the discursive framework within which Jews
became the subject of particular forms of scrutiny. Jews were imagined as a
problem, a project, or as the potential recipients of toleration.
As a discourse of historical rootedness, Schlegel’s project was beset with
ambiguity. The vision of ancient texts produced at the dawn of civilization
in a location distant in time and place from the banal here-and-now
produced an aura of mystery and power. But it raised the questions of
how the link between that ancient and esoteric past and the present might
be drawn, what kind of narrative was required to bridge these two worlds
and who those ancient people were in relation to the Germans in the
present. The Aryan model was intrinsically unstable, caught between
newer Romantic theories whereby it was authentic rootedness that gave
122 christopher hutton
possession of territory and the older ex oriente lux paradigm, which saw
human civilization as originating in the East (generally in China or Egypt)
and diffusing westward. The rise of what became the Indo-European
model in comparative-historical linguistics pushed languages like
Chinese to the extreme margins and triggered a century and a half of futile
speculation into where, between India and Europe, the Indo-European
homeland or “Aryan paradise” (to use Max Müller’s revealing phrase34) had
been located and what the religious and cultural characteristics of this
people had been.35

Aryans and Semites in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

In the period from 1830 to 1870, the Aryan paradigm stabilized, with the
definitive inclusion of the Celtic languages as part of the Indo-European
language family.36 Terminological uncertainty remained, with the
Norwegian Indologist Christian Lassen (1800–1876) complaining of
“unhistorical” terms like japhetisch and kaukasich and awkward com-
pounds like Indo-Germanisch. While the name of the people that had
settled vast areas of the earth was now lost, Lassen argued that Aryan was
the most suitable, since it had been used by the Indians and the ancient
Persians and was worthy of the warlike Germanic tribes. Lassen cited a
passage from Tacitus’ Germania, where the term Arii was used for one of
the tribes.37 While Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines38 has
become notorious for its promotion of Aryan superiority and its associa-
tion of miscegenation with decline, that very notoriety has obscured the
depth of chauvinism in the scholarly mainstream. The Swiss linguist
Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875) evoked “a people [race] destined by providence
to dominate the entire globe,” one distinguished by the “beauty of its
bloodline” (“beauté de sang”) and “gifts of intelligence.”39
The number of frameworks that addressed the concept of Aryan, or were
relevant to it, proliferated. The Biblical three-branch model of humanity
retained a presence in the nineteenth century but increasingly in an extra-
academic context.40 Joseph Bosworth (1788–1876) enumerated the lan-
guages spoken by the “Japhetic race,” with its presumptive “seat” or origin
being, according to some, near Mount Caucasian, according to others,
with “an Indian origin.” Shemitic or Semitic languages included Hebrew
(Chaldee, Syriac), Arabic, Aramaean, etc.41 Nineteenth-century
“Germanic philology” (germanische Philologie) combined prehistory, his-
tory, law, folklore, mythology, literary history and the Germanic languages
in their historical and geographical variation. Its primary exponent, Jacob
Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites 123
Grimm (1785–1863), extolled the rise of the “indogermanische Sprache,” a
chain of languages which stretched from Asia to Europe, to its position as
“the most powerful tongue in the world.”42 However, for the new disci-
pline of comparative historical linguistics, linguistic form, and not the text,
was the primary object of study. The founding work of this new, systematic
linguistics is often taken to be Franz Bopp’s (1791–1867) 1816 work of
comparative-historical grammar.43 The aim was to construct an author-
itative internal account of the origin and history of languages, understood
as autonomous objects, through the application of the newly rigorous
historical-comparative method. Increasingly, authentic data from attested
speech forms was preferred to textual or written evidence, a clear break
from the philological tradition.
The effect of this method was to further complicate debates about
categories such as Aryan and, in the colonial context, to introduce a form
of identity engineering through its application to superficially “raw” or
“unclassified” linguistic terrain. In India, British colonial linguistics articu-
lated the distinction between Aryan and Dravidian, thereby creating a
fundamental divide in the Indian subcontinent. While the distinction had
a complex prehistory,44 it became salient with the publications of Robert
Caldwell (1814–1891).45 From a Foucaultian perspective, colonial linguistics
brought the distinction into being, by abstracting away from the beliefs,
practices and metalinguistic cultures of the Indians themselves.46 Mid-
century saw the rise of what came to be referred to as “Aryan invasion
theory” (AIT), a narrative with a simple set of tropes: a superior invader,
entering the territory of present-day India from the northwest, conquered
an indigenous people. That conquest led to a flowering of a highly
advanced civilization, but eventually the elite interbred with the inferior
indigenous population, and this led to decadence and decline. The “Aryan
conquest” is generally dated to around 1500 BCE, but every detail of this
theory has been the subject of intense debate, and it remains a matter of
intellectual controversy in India.47 Hindu nationalist scholarship rejects
the notion of an Aryan invasion as a colonial construct.48 The discourse of
autochthonous Aryans is likewise found in present-day Iranian scholar-
ship.49 The effect of British colonialism in India was ultimately to entrench
Sanskrit as the authentically indigenous classical language and, with the
destruction of the Mughal court, to marginalize Persian and Arabic.50
In tracking the metamorphoses of Aryan, a complex set of problem are
posed by the term race. With its cognates across the European languages, it
requires historically informed readings and careful translation. Related and
overlapping terms in English include people, folk and nation; these, together
124 christopher hutton
with terms in French (race, peuple, nation), German (Rasse, Volk, Nation)
and other European languages, resonate with Latin gens and natio, Greek
ethnos, and Hebrew am and goi. A central turning point is the rise of
biological understandings of human diversity, in the form of racial anthro-
pology. Scientific race theory has its origins in the late eighteenth century,
with the studies of comparative human anatomy.51 In the mid-1840s,
Andres Retzius (1796–1860) introduced the terminological opposition
crucial to later Aryanism (and Nordicism) between dolicelaphic (“long-
skulled”) and brachycephalic (“short-skulled”); Paul Broca (1824–1880)
coined the key anthropometric term cephalic index.52 At the mid-century
mark, the Scottish anatomist Robert Knox (1793–1862) declared that “race
is everything in human history.”53 Darwinian theory affirmed the biologi-
cal unity of the human species; most radically, it suggested that the deep
structures of human nature were to be understood primarily in evolution-
ary terms.54 In 1859, Broca founded the Société d’anthropologie de Paris;
the Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863, breaking
away from the Ethnological Society. This marks the beginning of a pro-
liferation of learned societies (or sections thereof), academic journals and
museum collections under the banner of anthropology, i.e. racial anthro-
pology.55 In Germany, the ascent of Darwinism led to a mixed response, as
evolutionary theory interacted with a line of Romantic biology leading
from Goethe to Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) and Ernst Haeckel (1834–
1919).56 This tradition increasingly rejected what was seen as the biological
materialism of the Darwinian model.
A further disciplinary innovation was the development of a self-
consciously liberal Völkerpsychologie, associated with the Humboldtians
Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903) and Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899).
Völkerpsychologie, it has been argued, represents the origins of modern
cultural anthropology.57 The key concept was Volksgeist. This could be
deployed in a liberal humanist spirit, in the sense that each Volk was
understood to have its own culture and values, or be appropriated for
the essentialization of difference, where, for example, the Semitic
spirit was opposed to the Aryan (as in the phrase arischer Geist).58
Most significantly, the period saw articulation of the Aryan–Semite
dichotomy and its gradual entrenchment in the social imaginary and
literary controversies of educated Europeans.59 Two towering figures
in this regard were Ernest Renan (1823–1892) and Max Müller (1823–
1900), during whose long and complex careers tensions between
Romanticism and modernity, political liberalism and chauvinism,
were played out. Both Müller and Renan took as their starting
Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites 125
point the framework of comparative philology but understood it as a
modern, progressive, forward-looking enterprise.60 Renan shared with
Völkerpsychologie the understanding that belonging to a community
was a subjective psychological act,61 but his work is associated with
the elaboration of detailed stereotypes or national mentalities, notably
his much-cited view of the limitations of the Semitic mind.62 Renan’s
famous essay on the definition of nation should be understood as an
attempt, late in his scholarly career, to deal with the insuperable
definitional problems raised by the new racial framework and with
the consequent disciplinary split between anthropology, understood as
a “zoological” approach, and historical philology. When Renan denied
that a nation could be defined racially and argued that there were no
pure races, this was entirely in accord with the developing views of
racial anthropologists (though not with popular racism).63
Müller’s thinking underwent a similar process. His Aryanist evocation
of kinship between Indians and Europeans was a continuation of Biblical
universalism, framed within paternalistic colonialism and reflecting a
Romantic conception of human diversity and set of fantasy projections
back onto the deep past.64 Müller made an unpopular defense of kinship
between the Indians and their British rulers, namely that the same blood
ran in the veins of English soldier and the “dark Bengalese”: “Though the
historian may shake his head, though the physiologist may doubt, and the
poet scorn the idea, all must yield before the facts furnished by language.”
In ancient prehistory, “the ancestors of the Celts, the Germans, the Slaves,
the Greeks and Italians, the Persians and Hindus” had lived “under the
same roof,” separated from “the ancestors of the Semites and Turanians.”65
On this point, he had met with incredulity that “there could be any
community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the
so-called Niggers of India.”66 This framework was disrupted by the rise of
biological understandings of race. Having argued for the existence of an
Aryan race (in the Biblical sense, i.e. Volk), Müller backtracked, accepting
that there was no communality of blood between speakers of the Aryan
languages,67 i.e. no racial community in the modern anthropological sense:
“Needless to say, his retraction went largely unnoticed, and the history
books recorded the earlier Max Müller who, for a quarter of a century, had
contributed to the idea of a common racial Aryan ancestry based on a
common Aryan tongue.”68 But Müller’s new position was in line with
racial anthropology. If language were not a diagnostic of peoplehood, there
was no way to construct a historical narrative in relation to terms like
Celtic, German and Aryan. Müller sought to disassociate himself from the
126 christopher hutton
use of philology for racist ends and from theories of polygenesis that
invoked language; yet, ironically, the later drawing of a sharp distinction
between language and race meant that there could be no kinship between
the “English soldier” and the “dark Bengalese”: “To me an ethnologist who
speaks of an Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a
sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a
brachycephalic grammar.”69 Renan made an almost identical statement.70
No racial anthropologist in Nazi Germany would have disagreed.
The period from 1830 to 1870 saw the articulation of a series of powerful
dichotomies: between the true Aryan and the modern-day Indian; between
the conquering Aryan and the indigenous Dravidian; and between the
Aryan and the Semite. These dichotomies drew on and were sustained by
the methodologies of historical-comparative linguistics, so that any frame-
work that brought together a Semitic and an Indo-European language,71 or
Chinese and Indo-European,72 fell outside accepted scholarly norms.
Racial anthropology destabilized and in part dismantled these oppositions,
which lived on in popular racism, without providing a clear and unambig-
uous counter-narrative. Toward the close of the century, the science of race
increasingly adopted the anti-Semitism of the Aryan paradigm.

Conclusion
Aryanism ultimately was defined in opposition to the Semitic, which, with
the rise of European nationalism, meant that Jews became the Orient
within. The opposition between Aryans and Semites arose from the re-
inscription of the Biblical paradigm onto nineteenth-century Europe.73
This opposition was established and deeply entrenched in the popular and
scholarly imaginary before the full institutionalization of racial anthropol-
ogy. Post-Darwinian racial anthropology never recognized the existence of
an Aryan race, nor a Jewish race for that matter. There were Aryan peoples
(Völker) but no Aryan race (arische Rasse), just as the Jews were a Volk not a
Rasse. The term anti-Semitism is revealing in this respect. Modern
European anti-Semitism has its origins in the discourses of Volk, in the
idea that Jews were a people whose relationship to territory, culture,
language was unnatural, whose “spirit” (Geist) was radically alien and
whose presence as the potentially equal citizens of the European states
was profoundly troubling. This was particularly the case in Germany,
whose imagined ethnolinguistic unity was shown to be fictive by the new
science of racial anthropology. The Aryan paradigm posed the question of
how to understand the relationships within and among peoples, given the
Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites 127
range of intersecting criteria (archeological, historical, territorial, racial,
cultural, linguistic, etc.). In the late nineteenth century, the answer came in
the form of a rising panic, the sense that whatever congruities had existed
were being elided by urbanization, migration and miscegenation.
Both racial anthropology and comparative linguistics were part of a
wider revolt by disciplinary specialists against the philological tradition.
A term like Aryan therefore might be used within the philological frame-
work to refer to the history, languages and cultures of the Aryan peoples,
within anthropology to refer to a physical type or within the new compar-
ativist linguistics as the label for an abstract language family, i.e. a set of
formal linguistic relationships. It also took on a wide range of meanings in
the sphere of popular science. By 1900, the term race had at least four
distinguishable applications within scholarly discourse: (i) a generic term
for people, nation or Volk; (ii) humanity, as in the phrase “the human race”
(Menschenrasse); (iii) a particular “breeding population” understood as a
biological collective (as in the German term for eugenics, Rassenhygiene, or
“race hygiene”); (iv) anthropological race (as studied in racial anthropology
or Rassenkunde). The Volk/Rasse distinction was an established part of
mainstream academic discourse.74 But it was also the key to a critique of
the European nation state, seen as a social form that obscured underlying
racial and class realities.75 An influential figure in this regard was the
“anthropo-sociologist” Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936).76 The term race
also had a range of extra-academic and popular science usages, including
Madame Blavatsky’s theosophical concept of the “Aryan root race” with its
various “sub-races.”77
The use of the term Aryan race in English-language sources as shorthand
for Nazi ideology is now so entrenched as to be impervious to the textual
evidence, not least the writings produced by radical-right ideologues,
völkisch scholars and racial anthropologists between 1900 and 1944.78 In
Nazi Germany, the German term arisch (“Aryan”) was not used in colloca-
tion with Rasse (“race”) but only with Volk (“people”). While it is a key
term in Mein Kampf,79 and Nazism drew powerfully on Aryanism – the use
of the swastika is iconic of fascist Orientalism – official doctrine did not
sanction the use of arisch as a strictly racial term. The anthropologist Karl
Saller (1902–1969) was dismissed from his teaching post in Göttingen for
promoting the term deutsche Rasse (“German race”), and a similar fate
would have befallen any professor lecturing on the superior qualities of the
arische Rasse (“Aryan race”). This is not a mere matter of terminology. The
proposed lineage of Nazism that foregrounds reactionary Aryanism,
the aristocratic pessimist Gobineau and an exotic Orientalist philology
128 christopher hutton
occludes the powerful modernizing discourses that flow into Nazism,
including the self-consciously modern (and often politically liberal) science
of race, evolutionary theory, eugenics, modern linguistics and mainstream
European ethnic nationalism.80 This focus on Orientalism and Aryanism
has obscured a key historical insight: Jews did not assimilate into European
modernity. They were its cocreators, not an Oriental “other” within it.

Notes
1. Ernest Seillière, Le comte de Gobineau et l’aryanisme historique (Paris: Plon,
1903), p. 1.
2. Frank Hankins, The Racial Basis of Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1926), pp.
6–7, p. 23.
3. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and
Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: Tauris, 2004).
4. Guido List, Die Bilderschrift der Ario-Germanen (Leipzig: Steinacker, 1910),
p. 1.
5. Arno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen und Vielfalt
der Sprachen und Völker, 4 vols. (München: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag,
1995).
6. Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern
Central Europe (London: Palgrave, 2009), p. 148.
7. Mary Bouquet, “Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of
the Genealogical Diagram,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2
(1996): pp. 43–66.
8. See Josef Stalin, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, 1954).
9. Colin Masica, The Indo-Aryan Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).
10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herrmann und Dorothea (Berlin: Vieweg,
1797).
11. Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea, p. 87.
12. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Berlin:
Realschulbuchhandlung, 1808), p. 409.
13. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums
über die französische Revolution (Danzig: Ferdinand Troschel, 1793), p. 190.
14. Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies
and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 163ff.
15. Suzanne Zantop, Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–
1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
16. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and
the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 [1950]), p. 11.
17. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 11.
Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites 129
18. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1996).
19. William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London: Richardson,
1771), p. ii, p. xi.
20. Abraham Hyacynthe Anquetil-Duperron, Zend-Avesta: Ouvrage de Zoroastre,
contenant les idées théologiques, physiques et morales de ce législateur … (Paris:
Tilliard, 1771).
21. Johann Kleuker, Anhang zum Zend-Avesta, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1781–
83), 2: p. 141. See Hans Siegert, “Zur Geschichte der Begriffe ‘Arier’ und
‘arisch,’” Wörter und Sachen: Zeitschrift für indogermanische
Sprachwissenschaft, Volksforschung und Kulturgeschichte 4 (1941/1942), pp.
73–99; Dorothy Figueira, The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (Albany: SUNY,
1994), p. 139; Tuska Benes, “From Indo-Germans to Aryans: Philology and
the Racialization of Salvationist National Rhetoric, 1806–30,” in The German
Invention of Race, ed. Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany: SUNY, 2006),
pp. 167–181, p. 175.
22. Sir William Jones, “On the Hindus: The Third Anniversary Discourse,” in
The Works of Sir William Jones (London: Robinson, 1799), 2: pp. 19–34, p. 26,
p. 34.
23. Sir William Jones, “Discourse the Ninth on the Origin and Families of
Nations,” in The Works of Sir William Jones (London: Robinson, 1799), 1:
pp. 128–142, p. 132.
24. Christopher Hutton, “Fictions of Affinity and the Aryan Paradigm,” in Wort-
Macht-Stamm: Rassismums und Determinismus in der Philologie, eds. Markus
Messling and Ottmar Ette (Munich: Fink, 2013), pp. 89–103.
25. See John Cleland, The Way to Things by Words, and to Words by Things …
(London: Davis and Reymers, 1766).
26. See Maurice Olender, “Europe, or How to Escape Babel,” History and Theory
33 (1994): pp. 5–25.
27. Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin W. Lewis, The Indo-European Controversy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 19ff.
28. A. Leslie Wilson, “Herder and India: The Genesis of a Mythical Image,”
Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association 70 (1955): pp. 1049–1058.
29. Georg Forster, Sakontala, oder, Der entscheidende Ring: ein indisches Schauspiel
Kālidāsa (Mainz: Fischer, 1791); Romila Thapar, Sakuntala: Texts, Readings,
Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
30. Michael Dusche, “German Romantics Imagining India: Friedrich Schlegel
in Paris and Roots of Ethnic Nationalism in Europe,” Goethezeit-Portal
FORUM: Postkoloniale Arbeiten / Postcolonial Studies (2001). Available at
www.goethezeitportal.de.
31. Friedrich Schlegel, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Ein Beitrag zur
Begründung der Altertumskunde (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1808).
32. Friedrich Schlegel, “Über J. G. Rhode: Über den Anfang unserer Geschichte,”
Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur 8 (1819): pp. 413–468; Chen Toref-Ashkenazi,
Der romantische Mythos vom Ursprung der Deutschen. Friedrich Schlegel’s Suche
130 christopher hutton
nach der indogermanischen Verbindung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009); Markus
Messling, Gebeugter Geist. Rassenlogik und Erkenntnis in der modernen
europäischen Philologie. Studien zu Frankreich, Deutschland und Italien
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016).
33. Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary
Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1990).
34. Friedrich Max Müller, Biographies of Words and the Home of Aryas (London:
Longmans, 1888), p. 127.
35. Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
36. James Prichard, Eastern Origins of the Celtic Nations (London: Sherwood,
Gilbert and Piper, 1831); Adolphe Pictet, De l’affinité des langues celtiques avec
le sanscrit (Paris: Duprat, 1837).
37. Christian Lassen, “Über Herrn Professor Bopps grammatisches System der
Sanskritsprache,” Indische Bibliothek 3 (1830): pp. 1–113, p. 70fn. This term has
a variant, Harii. It was rendered Arians in Thomas Gordon’s translation: The
Works of Tacitus, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1753), p. 61.
38. Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, 2
vols. (Didot: Paris, 1853–1855).
39. Adolphe Pictet, Les origines indo-européennes ou les aryas primitifs, 2 vols.
(Paris: Cherbuliez, 1859), 1: p. 1.
40. John Wilson, Our Israelitish Origin: Lectures on Ancient Israel, and the
Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations of Europe (London: Nisbet, 1840).
41. Joseph Bosworth, A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language (London:
Longman, 1838), p. vii.
42. Jacob Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache (Berlin: Dümmler, 1858),
p. 10.
43. Franz Bopp, Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung
mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache
(Frankfurt am Main: Andreäsche Buchhandlung, 1816).
44. Frances Ellis, “Note to the Introduction,” in Alexander Duncan Campbell,
Grammar of the Teloogoo Language (Madras: College Press, 1816); Thomas
Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
45. Robert Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian
Family of Languages (London: Harrison, 1856).
46. To argue otherwise, one needs to believe that languages pre-exist their
reification in linguistic description. See Roy Harris, The Language Myth
(London: Duckworth, 1981).
47. Romila Thapar, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Madhav M. Deshpande and
Shareen Ratnagar, India: Historical Beginnings and the Concept of the Aryan
(New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007).
48. Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakadan, Breaking India: Western
Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines (Bophal: Amaryllis, 2011).
Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites 131
49. Jahanshah Derakhshani, Die Arier in den nahöstlichen Quellen des 3. und 2.
Jahrtausends v. Chr. Grundzüge der Vor- und Frühgeschichte Irans, 2nd edn.
(Teheran: International Publications of Iranian Studies, 1998). For a contrast-
ing view, see Aalireza Asgharzadeh, Iran and the Challenge of Diversity: Islamic
Fundamentalism, Aryanist Racism, and Democratic Struggles (Berlin: Springer,
2007).
50. William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (New
York: Vintage, 2006).
51. Johann Blumenbach, De generis humani varietate native (Göttingen, 1775).
52. Claude Blanckaert, De la race á l’évolution. Paul Broca et l’anthropologie
française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), pp. 209ff.
53. Robert Knox, The Races of Men (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850), p. 14.
54. Thomas Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams &
Norgate, 1863).
55. Uwe Hossfeld, Geschichte der biologischen Anthropologie in Deutschland
(Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), pp. 167ff.
56. Robert Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over
Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
57. Ivan Kalmar, “The Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal and the
Modern Concept of Culture,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): pp.
671–690.
58. Albrecht Wirth, Geschichte Asiens und Osteuropas (Halle: Gebauer-
Schwetschke, 1905), p. 75.
59. Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English
National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Geoffrey
Nash, “Aryan and Semite in Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold’s Quest for
the Religion of Modernity,” Religion and Literature 46:1 (2014): pp. 1–27.
60. See Dora Bierer, “Renan and His Interpreters: A Study in French Intellectual
Warfare,” The Journal of Modern History 25 (1953): pp. 375–389.
61. Egbert Klautke, The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851–
1955 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), p. 42.
62. While Renan was using the term race in the sense of Volk, it is odd to acquit
him on that account of racism, as if the only truly problematic discourse of
difference is biological. See Ernest Renan, Histoire générale et système comparé
des langues sémitiques (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1855), pp. 4–5; Geoffrey
Galt Harpham, “Roots, Races, and the Return to Philology,” Representations
106 (2009): pp. 34–62. Why “culturalism” is less toxic than racism based on
biology is never explained (see discussion in Arvidsson, Aryan Idols, p. 107).
63. Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? 2nd ed. (Paris: Lévy, 1882).
64. Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997), pp. 15–16.
65. Friedrich Max Müller, The Languages of the Seat of War in the East, 2nd ed.
(London: Williams and Nortgate, 1855), pp. 29–30.
66. Friedrich Max Müller, India: What Can it Teach Us? (London: Longmans,
Green, 1883), p. 28.
132 christopher hutton
67. Klaus von See, Barbar, Germane, Arier (Heidelberg: Winter, 1994), p. 144.
68. Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan
Migration Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 33.
69. Friedrich Max Müller, Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas
(London: Longmans, Green, 1888), p. 120.
70. Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, p. 16.
71. Thomas Stratton, The Affinity between the Hebrew Language and the Celtic
(Edinburgh: MacLachan and Stewart, 1872).
72. Joseph Edkins, China’s Place in Philology: An Attempt to Show that the
Languages of Europe and Asia Have a Common Origin (London: Trübner,
1871).
73. Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in
the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009 [1992]).
74. Heymann Steinthal, “Dialekt, Sprache, Volk, Staat, Rasse,” in Festschrift für
Adolf Bastian zu seinem 70. Geburtstage (Berlin: Reimer, 1896), pp. 47–51.
75. Josef Ludwig Reimer, Ein pangermanisches Deutschland (Berlin: Luckhardt,
1905), pp. 39ff.
76. George Vacher de Lapouge, L’aryen: son rôle social (Paris: Fontemoing, 1899).
77. Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 2 vols. (New York: Theosophical
University Press, 1888).
78. Christopher Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial
Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
79. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 2 vols. (München: Eher Verlag, 1925–1926).
80. Christopher Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Race, Mother-Tongue
Fascism and the Science of Language (London: Routledge, 1999).
chapter 7

Orientalism and the Bible

Ivan Kalmar

It has become something of a cliché that the “western discourse” that

Edward W. Said labeled “orientalism,”1 which included scholarship about
an area labeled the “Orient,” regarded the Orient as the West’s “Other.”
However, it was a crucial fact for both scholarly and popular Orientalism
that the Orient contained the homeland of the Bible. This was because the
Bible is the deﬁning document of Christianity, and Christianity the
deﬁning document of the West. Hence the Orient was regarded as much
as the Mother as the Other by Orientalists in the nineteenth century,
which saw the spectacular rise of biblical philology, a discipline that
regarded the Bible as an Oriental document: the product of the Oriental
mind. The very concept of an Oriental mind, in fact, owed its modern
essence to biblical philology.
And yet, the central role of the Bible in Orientalism has often been
overlooked and sometimes actively denied. My major task is to suggest
some ways to begin to restore biblical concerns to their due place in the
historiography of Orientalism.

Edward Said and Raymond Schwab

As I will suggest at the end of the chapter, there is no contradiction between
Orientalism’s biblical concerns and its imperialist implications, which
were Said’s focus. Studying Orientalism’s biblical connection can, in
fact, help us to understand it better as a colonial discourse. Yet while
Said did repeatedly refer to biblical study by Orientalist scholars, as will
be seen in some of the references that follow, on the whole he left the topic
aside, in spite of its overwhelming presence in the archive. Why?
It may be that Said’s neglect of the biblical dimension of Orientalism
was due to his reading of Raymond Schwab’s book The Oriental
Renaissance. The work first appeared in French in 1950.2 Said made
about a dozen references to it in Orientalism and then wrote an admiring
133
134 ivan kalmar
preface to the English edition of 1984.3 What Schwab meant by
“Renaissance”4 was a surge of interest in India and the farther East,
which he dated to the “discovery” and translation of the Zoroastrian
holy scriptures, the Zend Avesta, by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-
Duperron, in 1771. The “heroic age” of this “Renaissance” lasted until
1875, which, Schwab wrote, “seems a kind of boundary line after which
few, if any, important revelations occurred in the regions that con-
cern me.”5
The basic tenet pursued by Schwab is that the “oriental renaissance” was
occasioned by the discovery of holy scriptures other than the Bible. Until
Anquetil presented the Zend Avesta to the West, Schwab believes, the
Orient was seen merely as an exotic oddity:
The strangeness it offered at small cost produced an entire Orient of sofas
and erotic and satiric masques that only too often encouraged literary
history to frolic in shabby exoticism.6
This changed radically once the West discovered that the Bible was not the
only holy scripture available to humanity.
With the establishment of oriental studies an entirely new meaning was
introduced for the word “mankind.” . . . For so long only Mediterranean,
humanism began to be global when the scientific reading of Avestan and
Sanskrit scripts unlocked innumerable unsuspected scriptures.7
Yet Schwab was aware that in the Western consciousness there had
already been, even before the discovery of non-biblical holy writs, not
only the exotically frivolous Orient but also what he called the “Orient of
the Bible.”
The Orient of the Bible had not ceased to exist in the life of Christian
nations, but its complexion and its title would change. On the one hand its
imagery, which made Voltaire smile, excited the imagination as it had not
done since the poets of the Reformation. This was thanks to Chateaubriand
and Herder, and to new interpretations which, in England and in Germany,
established the Holy Scripture as a department of great primitive poetry,
serving as a model for, and a virtual challenge to, learned poetry.8
However, in Schwab’s view, the Orientalist approaches to the Bible,
which led theologians to seek answers to questions about the Bible in the
related literatures of other, mostly Semitic-speaking, peoples, eventually
caused scholars and other writers to move on. They were able to free the
study of the Orient, and indeed the study of the world’s cultural heritage,
from the biblical baggage of the past:
Orientalism and the Bible 135
A newcomer, Assyriology, seriously challenged exegesis; nothing so critical
of scriptural authority had previously appeared, not even with Richard
Simon or Jean Astruc. The innovators themselves had started on the trail
of lost scriptures solely to nourish theological controversy. All the discov-
eries of scriptures issued from this battle over Scripture. But although they
totally changed the notion of the world and the shape of history, biblical
studies, which had been the point of departure, lost the initiative for
advance. . . . Hebrew was eclipsed by cuneiform.9
“All the discoveries of scriptures issued from this battle over Scripture.”
Richard Simon (1638–1712) is one of the early figures in what would be later
called the “higher criticism” movement in biblical philology. He was
probably best known for his insistence, in his Critical History of the Old
Testament, that Moses could not have been the author of all the texts that
were attributed to him.10 Jean Astruc (1684–1766) similarly examined the
Bible with the methods of literary analysis but came to the conclusion that
Moses did write all the texts whose authorship Simon had disputed. There
is no doubt that the scholars who discovered new holy scriptures farther
east had developed their thinking within the context of this effort to open
up the Bible (and with it Christianity) to scientific philological inquiry.
However, Schwab’s notion that thereby biblical studies were “eclipsed”
is open to challenge. The Indologists and Persianists of the long eighteenth
century were, for the most part, fervent Christians. As they studied non-
biblical Oriental religions, their motivation continued to be their concern
about the comparative value and validity of the Bible. They sought not to
supplant the Bible but to affirm it as part of a universal religious truth. This
universal truth was demonstrated by the non-biblical Oriental scriptures as
well as the Bible. Indeed, though Schwab devotes almost his whole book to
discussing how India and the Far East have caused the West to change
beyond the influence of the Bible, at the end of The Oriental Renaissance he
does acknowledge that the “oriental Renaissance” was about a “dialogue of
creeds.”11
Romantic Orientalism, which was inspired by and probably inspired
much of the philological work of the higher criticism, had the avowed goal
of maintaining religious faith by reference to non-Christian religions. For
understanding this extremely important and pervasive aspect of nine-
teenth-century thought, Emily Shaffer’s Kubla Khan and the Fall of
Jerusalem (1980) remains indispensable. Referring not only to Coleridge
but also to his contemporaries among English-, French- and German-
speaking authors, and their use of biblical philology, Shaffer suggests that
they worked from two premises:
136 ivan kalmar
The first premise, that criticism could not shirk bringing the Biblical
accounts under the rational scrutiny of the new natural philosophy, had
originated in a scathing attack from rationalists, deists, and sceptics on the
whole range of supernatural claims made by and for the Bible. The second
premise, that the Bible is to be approached like any other literary text,
entailed the freedom to amend the “Holy Spirit” by establishing an accurate
text, sifting the historical sources, questioning the traditional ascriptions of
authorship and date, scrutinizing the formation of the canon, and compar-
ing the Scriptures coolly with the sacred and secular writings of other
nations. The significance of this procedure, whether or not it was openly
stated in any given case, was simply the abandonment of the claim that the
Bible is “inspired.”
At the same time, however, the literary treatment of the Bible opened
the way to a new apologetics of free-thinking theism, which was to salvage
Christianity until very nearly the end of the Victorian era. It has been said
that the higher criticism abolished traditional apologetics, only to establish
a new apologetics vis-à-vis the Enlightenment.12
Here Shaffer’s analysis resembles at first sight that of Said, whose
Orientalism appeared only two years earlier. Said wrote that
anyone who, like Schlegel or Franz Bopp, mastered an Oriental language
was a spiritual hero, a knight-errant bringing back to Europe a sense of the
holy mission it had now lost. . . . No less than Schlegel, Wordsworth, and
Chateaubriand, Auguste Comte – like Bouvard13 – was the adherent and
proponent of a secular post-Enlightenment myth whose outlines are unmis-
takably Christian.14
There is, however, one important difference between Said and
Shaffer. Shaffer recognized that the “post-secular Enlightenment
myth” was not necessarily secular: often it was explicitly and deliber-
ately Christian, in much more than its outlines. Nor was this simply
an assertion, as Schwab would have it, of a multifaith “dialogue of
creeds.” For the avowed unity of Christianity and non-biblical Eastern
religions was meant to be on Christian terms, affirming the super-
iority of Christianity while also espousing admirable features of
Oriental religions. The research of similarities between Christian and
other texts was in fact affirmed by many missionaries. William Jones
noted that some, pointing out what they thought were similarities
between the Christian Trinity and the Hindu trimurti of Brahma,
Krishna and Vishnu, suggested to Hindus that they were already
“almost Christians.” Jones, however, rejected the comparison. While
he was capable of enthusiasm for the Hindu religion and even
Orientalism and the Bible 137
suggested it was in some specific aspects superior to Christianity, he
maintained that Hinduism did not achieve the sublimity of the
Christian faith.15
Shaffer gives as her prime examples Coleridge and Hölderlin. Herder
and Goethe were perhaps more “freethinking” and less attached to
Christian faith, yet the overall formula applies to them as well. It applies
in France to Edgar Quinet and, later, to the romantic Orientalism of Saint-
Simonian authors such as Enfantin or Barrault.16
This Auseinandersetzung between the Orientalist philology of the Bible
and scholarship on Zoroastrian and Vedic texts begs for more research, as it
is without a doubt a major feature of the genealogy of all Orientalist
thought and imagination. I hope, however, to have said enough to show
that Schwab was wrong to contend that the “Oriental Renaissance” (that is,
Orientalism during the period that Said focused on) had left the Bible
behind.
It is clear that Said was impressed by Schwab, even though the latter
focused on Orientalism as a creative force that reshaped the West rather
than, as Said did, a discourse of Western domination. In fact, Schwab did
briefly refer to early Orientalist work on the Bible by Lowth and Herder as
a “preparation for the Empire of the Irrational and the Unconscious” but
without a hint of awareness that Orientalism was located on the path to
Western empire in the East and not only to the cult of the irrational in the
West. In Sarga Moussa’s view, Said’s work was a kind of complement to
Schwab’s:
[W]hile Schwab focused on India, Said considered but the so-called Arab-
Muslim world; while Schwab was interested in the romantic image of the
ancient Orient, Said stressed the Orient contemporary to the authors of his
corpus; while Schwab was passionate about the process of knowledge
“incorporation” and thus about the opening up of an Occident that he
saw as nourished by the Orient, Said, inversely, never ceased, at least in
Orientalism, to obsess about the differences . . . and, then, that Schwab made
little of colonialism. As for Said, he placed it at the center of his theoretical
apparatus.17
Such distinctions might have been expected to earn Schwab a negative
review by Said, Moussa believes, but Said saw himself rather as enlarging
on Schwab’s work, which he recognized as groundbreaking. To be sure,
Said did allow himself at least one rather subdued but potent passage in
Orientalism that was critical of Schwab’s project. (Note also Said’s
acknowledgment, never made quite as straightforwardly by Schwab, of
the role of the Bible.)
138 ivan kalmar
What Bouvard has in mind – the regeneration of Europe by Asia – was a
very influential Romantic idea. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example,
urged upon their countrymen, and upon Europeans in general, a detailed
study of India because, they said, it was Indian culture and religion that
could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of
Occidental culture. And from this defeat would arise a new, revitalized
Europe: the Biblical imagery of death, rebirth, and redemption is evident in
this prescription. Moreover, the Romantic Orientalist project was not
merely a specific instance of a general tendency; it was a powerful shaper
of the tendency itself, as Raymond Schwab has so convincingly argued in La
Renaissance orientale. But what mattered was not Asia so much as Asia’s use
to modern Europe.18
Here Said is doing what he has done to all apparently pro-Orient, “soft
orientalism”19 as a whole: revealing that Western power is one of its
underpinnings regardless of any individual Orientalist’s good intentions.
Given this reading (a correct one, no doubt), Said has no difficulty
putting in one basket the earlier soft Orientalism of a Quinet and the later
Orientalism of Ernest Renan, whom he presents as a very hard Orientalist
indeed. “Whenever Renan wished to make a statement about either the
Jews or the Muslims,” Said wrote, “it was always with his remarkably harsh
(and unfounded, except according to the science he was practicing) stric-
tures on the Semites in mind.”20 Quinet, on the other hand, from whom
Schwab appears to have borrowed the term “Oriental Renaissance,”21 was
one of those who believed in the potential of the Orient to revitalize the
spirituality of the West. “Out of the East-West encounter,” Said suggests,
a new dogma of god is born, but Quinet’s point is that both East and West
fulfill their destinies and confirm their identities in the encounter. As a
scholarly attitude the picture of a learned Westerner surveying as if from a
peculiarly suited vantage point the passive, seminal, feminine, even silent
and supine East, then going on to articulate the East, making the Orient
deliver up its secrets under the learned authority of a philologist whose
power derives from the ability to unlock, secret, esoteric languages – this
would persist in Renan.22

Renan
The French scholar and writer Ernest Renan (1823–1892) was one of Said’s
main examples of an Orientalist. Renan’s General History and Comparative
System of the Semitic Languages (1855)23 was most responsible for introdu-
cing the term “Semitic” into European languages as referring not only to a
language family but also to a type of culture or civilization. Said appears to
Orientalism and the Bible 139
maintain that Renan’s interest in the Semitic world was sparked not by the
traditions of biblical Orientalism but by the example of Indic and Sinic
studies. He proposed that “if the Orient had been hitherto identified
exclusively [sic!] and indiscriminately with India and China, Renan’s
ambition was to carve out a new Oriental province for himself, in this
case the Semitic Orient.”24
It is as though, in Said’s eyes, Renan had found his way back to the wider
biblical Orient after Orientalism had, à la Schwab, moved on from it. This
would seem to suggest a chronology whereby (i) Orientalists are at first
interested in the Bible, but then (ii) they turn “exclusively” to “India and
China,” and then, at last, (iii) Renan returns Orientalism to the “Semitic
Orient.” Now, Said’s work in Orientalism and for the most part beyond is
devoted almost entirely to Western discourses about the Arab – that is, the
Semitic – Orient, with important but infrequent nods to Orientalism and
the Jews and some telling but relatively marginal observations about
Orientalism and the Indian subcontinent. China (and Japan for that
matter) is left more or less out of sight.
This chronology would have allowed Said to distance himself from the
study of biblical philology, but Said was mistaken. After all, among the
major figures he himself used as examples from the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, respectively, were the French philologist
Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) and the English traveler-scholar Edward
Lane (1810–1876). Each provided rich evidence for two of the features of
Orientalism as a discourse of domination that Said was particularly inter-
ested in. Sacy’s compilation of Arab literature, Chréstomathie arabe (1806),
for the use of students of Arabic, had a great influence on subsequent
Arabists. Lane was exemplary of a later type of Orientalist, who traveled
and resided in the Orient, using their sojourn as a mark of authority to
report on the Orient to the West. “The Egyptians are disemboweled for
exposition,” says Said, “then put together admonishingly by Lane.”25 Lane,
who translated the One Thousand and One Nights into English, was said to
use the King James Bible as a means to capture what he hoped would come
across as “Oriental” language in English.26 (In fact, the use of the archaic
second-person pronoun thou, which is typical of the Bible, remained
common in popular literature, as in the best-selling Sheik saga by Edith
Maul Hull, which was turned into blockbuster films in 1921 and 1926).27
The implicit association of Oriental life with life in the biblical Holy Land
was made clear by Lane’s sister, Sophia Poole, on a visit to her brother in
Cairo. “In the mention of the veil we trace the Hareem system to the time
of Abraham,” she writes.28
140 ivan kalmar
Sacy was less obviously influenced by the Bible in his assessments of
Arabic and other associated languages and cultures. It should be noted,
though, that even he, an heir of a Jansenist Catholic family, came to the
Semitic language family by first learning Hebrew.29
Renan, then, did not come to the biblical Orient via India and
China. But perhaps that is not what Said intended. Geoffrey Nash
suggests a more affirming interpretation of what Said might have
meant. On Nash’s reading of Said, the latter is referring to Renan’s
discovery that he could draw on the work of Orientalist scholars of
Persia and India and incorporate it into his own vision of a modern
religion.30 Renan wrote in the context of two characteristics that
defined nineteenth-century philology: first, the precise study of texts
as a mirror of the creative genius of a “race”; and second, the search
for salvaging religion from literalist dogma, as a form of mythology
essential to humanity, with Christianity its most evolved traditional
form. As examples, I have already mentioned Coleridge, Hölderlin,
Goethe and others. Nash adds Matthew Arnold and Renan. As he
notes, however, it was Renan who anchored, more than any of his
contemporaries, the then-popular opposition between an intolerant
mediocrity of religion and mind, as against freedom and creativity,
in the opposition between Semites and Aryans.

Arabizing the Bible

In order to preserve the superiority of Christianity, this required two
moves: presenting the Bible as Semitic but also presenting Christianity,
notwithstanding its biblical roots, as Aryan.
I have elsewhere called the first of these two intellectual manoeuvers
“Arabizing the Bible.”31 The genealogy of reading the Bible as expres-
sing a Semitic spirit includes the long history of imagining Islam as a
kindred religion of Judaism.32 It would be the philologists, cognizant
of the obvious similarities between Hebrew and Arabic, who turned
that kinship into one that could be studied through linguistic
cognates.
In the eighteenth century still, the Arabic affiliation of the Bible com-
peted, in scholars’ minds, with what they understood as its Greek connec-
tion. They believed that Homer read the Bible. In fact, it was this
assumption that led Joseph Spence, in his Essay on Pope’s Odyssey (1726),
to introduce, as he saw it, the word “Orientalism” into the English
language. He was commenting on a Homeric passage
Orientalism and the Bible 141
where the Greek speaks “Of the sun being perished out of Heaven, and of
darkness rushing over the Earth!” I cannot express the fullness of the words –
But you know the original; and, I fear, will never see a translation equal to it.
This whole prophetical vision . . . is the True Sublime; and in particular,
gives us an higher Orientalism than we meet with in any other part of
Homer’s writings. You will pardon me a new word, where we have no old
one to my purpose: You know what I mean, that Eastern way of expressing
Revolutions in Government, by a confusion or extinction of light in the
Heavens.33
This view of “Orientalism,” which united the Hebrew spirit with the
Greek, was amenable to the Anglicanism typical at the time at Winchester
College and Oxford University, where Spence befriended, among others,
Robert Lowth (1710–1787), the future Bishop of London and author of the
Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (which had an influence on
Johann Gottfried Herder’s even more significant The Spirit of Hebrew
Poetry).34 English religion and erudition, as they saw it, united and
advanced the ancient Hebrew and Greek strands, as did the Bible itself.
Unlike Spence, however, Lowth had recourse to other Semitic languages
in his biblical interpretation, including Arabic. Lowth’s note on Job xvi. 10
is typical for the manner in which he commutes effortlessly from Hebrew
to Greek to Arabic in his commentary:
Jilmaleon, according to the Sept. όμαθυμαδου δε κατεδραμου: R.L.B.
Gershom, They were gathered together: and the Arabic verb Mala denotes
in vi. Conjugation, They assisted one another, and were unanimous, (as if a
great multitude were collected together;) and it is construed with the
preposition gnale, as in this passage.35
The reference to R. L. B. Gershom is evidently to Rabbi Levi ben
Gershom (1288–1344), a Jewish philosopher of Provence, whose familiarity
with Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle made his work an important link
between the Christian and Islamic heirs of Greek philosophy. Lowth’s
knowledge of this Jewish scholar (and his reference to him as “Gershom”
rather than the commonly used Hellenization “Gersonides”), as well as his
reference to the Arabic language, demonstrate the willingness, typical of
the period, to take Christianity’s Oriental context very seriously. A
Christian interest is also a key to the reason why a chair of Arabic was
instituted at Oxford in 1636–1641. Said dates Oriental studies to the
Council of Vienne in 1312, where university chairs in Hebrew, Arabic
and Chaldean (as well as Greek) were explicitly mentioned as a tool for
converting infidels. At Oxford, Arabic was also meant to help missionaries,
and the first Oxford professor of Arabic, Edward Pococke (1604–1691),
142 ivan kalmar
produced several Christian texts in Arabic with the same aim. But there can
be no doubt that using Arabic for biblical exegesis (because of its proximity
to Hebrew) was a far more prestigious scholarly activity than writing
conversionary pamphlets. Pococke was also a professor of Hebrew, as
were many if not all of his successors throughout England for a long time.
The influential German Orientalist scholar Johann David Michaelis
(1717–1791), whose comments on Lowth’s Sacred Poetry were included in
its successive republications, was also a major believer in using Arabic as a
key to the Hebrew Bible. One of Lowth’s propositions that Michaelis
espoused enthusiastically was that the Book of Job was the oldest of the
Bible and that it “seems to have little connexion with the other writings of
the Hebrews, and no relation whatever to the affairs of the Israelites.” Its
characters are “Idumaeans, or at least Arabians of the adjacent country, all
originally of the race of Abraham.” Using some further “evidence,”
Michaelis in fact concluded that “most of the peculiar customs of the
Israelites, those I mean which distinguished them from other descendants
of Abraham, were either derived from the Egyptians, or were taught them
by Moses.”36 In other words, Michaelis believed, the Israelites had brought
to Egypt nothing peculiar to themselves, as opposed to Oriental peoples in
general.
Eventually, this kind of thinking led to a broadening of reference for the
terms “Arab” and “Arabian,” such that it came to include “Jew” and
“Jewish” and was in fact a precursor of what, mainly under Renan’s
influence, would be called “Semite” and “Semitic” later.37 Hegel included
Judaism when he spoke of “Arabian religion,” for example, as did
Benjamin Disraeli when he made one of the characters in Tancred say,
“Let men doubt of unicorns; but of one thing there can be no doubt, that
God never spoke except to an Arab.”38
One logical, and probably intended, consequence of this denial of a
distinctive Jewish cultural character of the Bible was to refuse to contem-
porary Jews the mantle of modern-day carriers of the biblical spirit.
Instead, to find a still-living biblical culture one needed to look for a people
who share that achievement but have not changed. The history of expedi-
tions to the Orient in search of studying what might be called the
“historical Bible” needs to be far more fully investigated and documented
than scholars have done to date. Suffice it to say that such travel, even for
short periods, became almost de rigueur for people claiming expertise on
the Bible that was more than just strictly philological. Among the long list
of nineteenth-century travelers who shared their insights into biblical
culture, one might rather arbitrarily mention the French author and
Orientalism and the Bible 143
diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand (in the Orient in 1806);39 the
author-politician Benjamin Disraeli (traveled 1830–1831);40 and the dean in
his day of all Orientalists, Ignaz Goldziher (1873–1874).41

Aryanizing Christianity
For Ernest Renan, too, his controversial, yet widely successful, Life of Jesus
(1860) was legitimated by his field trip to the Holy Land.42 In the Life of
Jesus, Renan argues that Jesus was not fully Semitic, because he came from
the Galilee, which, as opposed to Judea, Renan described as a racial melting
pot. Suzannah Heschel details how, through supportive reworkings by
subsequent generations, the “search for an Aryan Jesus” culminated in the
pronouncements of some of the theologians in Nazi Germany.43
The genealogy of the “search for an Aryan Jesus” includes the formation
of “Semitic” as a designation for a racialized creative spirit that produced,
most noticeably, the Bible and the Quran, which happened along with,
and as an antithesis to, the evolution of “Aryan.” The latter was a civiliza-
tional term created on the basis of the philological discovery of the Indo-
European relationship (known also as Indo-Germanic). Nash connects
Renan’s practice of opposing Semitic and Aryan to a nineteenth-century
tradition, exemplified by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel and
Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau.
In this connection, one may also include the influence of G. F. W.
Hegel. In the Philosophy of History, Hegel traces the development of the
Weltgeist or “world spirit” through a racialized evolution where at each
successive stage a different Volk (people or race) is the carrier of each
distinctive psychic constellation, producing – among other things, but
perhaps most importantly – different religions. The “Arabian” religions,
which include Judaism as well as Islam, constitute a stage Hegel dubs as a
“religion of the sublime” (die Religion der Erhabenheit). The main feature
of this form of religion and thought is that God is exceedingly distant from
humanity; he is worshipped as a totally transcendental majesty. In contrast,
the higher religion exemplified by Christianity, and especially by its
Protestant form, is the fruit of the patient, centuries-long work (Arbeit)
of the Germanic (sic – germanisches, not deutsches) Volk.44

Racial Supersessionism
It is true that Hegel does not explicitly associate Christianity with other
Aryans such as the Persians and Indians, whose religion he sees somewhat
144 ivan kalmar
differently. But what is characteristic, if not trend-setting, is the way he,
first, connects Judaism and Islam as the expressions of the same religious
spirit and, second, posits Christianity to represent a higher stage, trans-
cending the limitations of its biblical background. Whether one sees
Christianity’s relationship to Judaism/Islam as a mature outgrowth, as
did Hegel, or a foreign graft, as did Renan, the limits of Semitic religion
are asserted and expressed in racialized terms. Christianity is the product of
a race (Volk) other than the Jews or their kin, the Arabs, in spite of its holy
text, and its Savior, having been born in the Orient.
The inevitable tool of making this argument is to contrast the Greek
“New Testament” to the Hebrew “Old Testament.” In what is perhaps the
most eloquent part of his teaching, the “Antitheses” of the Sermon on the
Mount (Matt 5:17–48), Jesus makes a set of statements framed by the
phrases “You have heard it said that . . . but I say to you that . . .” Most
famously, in Matt 5:38–39, he advises to turn the other cheek, as opposed to
demanding “an eye for an eye” (Lev 24:20). All of the Antitheses follow an
Old Testament injunction with one by Jesus. In spite of the conjunction
“but” (δὲ), the mainstream Christian view is that Jesus did not mean to
negate the Old Testament but to enlarge on it with a higher morality. This
accords with Jesus’ statement “Think not that I am come to destroy the
law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”45 The
statement poignantly expresses the “supersessionist” view of Christianity:
it does not invalidate the ancient Jewish religion but represents its higher
stage.
This internal supersession within the Christian Bible, of the Hebrew
Old Testament with the Greek New, is fundamental to almost all branches
of the Christian faith. It is frequently associated with the contrast, deemed
fundamental to Western civilization by Harold Bloom, between Law and
Love.46 Judaism (and, in the nineteenth-century racialized version, Semitic
religion) represents the former, and Christianity (produced by the Aryan
spirit) the latter.
For Renan and other nineteenth-century thinkers, who were not
wedded to Christianity as revealed dogma but as the highest form or
religion springing from the depths of the Indo-European soul, the
Aryan spirit was able to duplicate the contrast between frigid legalism
and the tempering compassion of love, not only in Christianity but
even within Islam. Nash details the way in which the nineteenth-
century Persian religious rebel and martyr Ali Muhammad Shirazi, aka
Bab, appeared as a kind of latter-day Christ to his contemporaries in
Europe.47
Orientalism and the Bible 145
The supersessionist relationship between the New and Old Testaments
and between Christianity and Judaism – a relationship that purports
to value the earlier version only to affirm the superiority of the later
version – obtains in a sense also between the nineteenth-century “religion
of philology” and Christianity. As Hegel valued Christianity over
“Arabian” religion, which he, however, placed much higher than other
Near Eastern religions, let alone the religions of Africa or the Americas, so
he and Renan et al. placed their own understanding of universal religion
higher than Christianity. This allowed them to be at the same time critics
of traditional dogmatic Christianity and the associated authority of the
Church and to propound an ideology of Western superiority which,
regarding the Muslim-Arab Orient, rested on the superiority of Aryan
religion, while regarding India it rested on the hopes that modern Western
Christians can reinvigorate the dormant Hinduism and Buddhism along
the lines of their own revaluation of Christianity. It is true that such
feelings about India became much weaker in colonizing Britain as the
resistance of the natives stiffened in the later nineteenth century. It did,
however, continue in Germany, and even in the English-speaking world it
resulted in millions adhering to such syncretist, Aryanist movements as
theosophy.48

Conclusion
This chapter is a sketch of the kind of facts available about
Orientalism in biblical scholarship, a topic that still awaits deﬁnitive,
book-length treatment. When all the facts are in, they will have the
potential of substantially deepening, rather than denying, the force of
the Saidian analysis. While Said, and indeed much of the subsequent
literature on Orientalism, may have missed the full force of the
Orientalists’ concerns with the Bible, those concerns did not normally
stand in opposition to Orientalism’s colonial agenda. The real task
that this chapter points to is not to oppose biblical Orientalism to
imperialist Orientalism. It is, rather, to investigate further how theo-
logical supersessionism relates to racial supersessionism as a discourse
and ideology of Western domination.

Notes
1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Verso, 1978).
2. Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950).
146 ivan kalmar
3. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and
the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
4. Schwab apparently copied the title of a chapter in Edgar Quinet’s Génie
des religions (1842). The idea was that while the original Renaissance
invigorated Europe through the rediscovery of ancient texts, the Oriental
Renaissance did so by the discovery of previously unknown Indic and Far
Eastern texts.
5. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 8.
6. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 4
7. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, pp. 4–5.
8. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 5.
9. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 5.
10. Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Rotterdam: Reinier
Leers, 1685).
11. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, chapter 5, “A Question of the Soul: The
Dialogue of Creeds.”
12. E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School
in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 62–63.
13. Said is referring to one of the two protagonists of Gustave Flaubert’s incom-
plete novel Bouvard et Pécuchet.
14. Said, Orientalism, p. 115.
15. Sharada Sugirtharajah, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective
(London: Routledge, 2003), p. 17.
16. See M. Levallois and S. Moussa, L’orientalisme des saint-simonistes (Paris:
Maisonneuve & Larosse, 2006).
17. Sarga Moussa, “Edward W. Said lecteur de Raymond Schwab,” Sociétés et
Représentations 1:37 (2014): pp. 69–78, p. 77. Translation mine.
18. Said, Orientalism, 115.
19. See Ivan Kalmar, Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime
Power (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 130–131.
20. Said, Orientalism, p. 141.
21. Moussa, “Edward Said,” p. 72.
22. Said, Orientalism, pp. 137–138.
23. Ernest Renan, Histoire générale et systėme comparé des langues sémitiques (Paris:
Imprimerie Impériale, 1855).
24. Said, Orientalism, p. 138.
25. Said, Orientalism, p. 111.
26. Paulo L. Horta, “‘A Covenant for Reconciliation?’ Lane’s Thousand and One
Nights and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda,” in Scheherazade’s Children: Global
Encounters with the Arabian Nights, eds. Marina Warner and Philip K.
Kennedy (New York: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 154–171, pp.
156–157.
27. E. M. Hull, The Sheik (Philadelphia: Pine Street Books, 2001 [1919]); The Sons
of the Sheik (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1925).
Orientalism and the Bible 147
28. Sophie Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo, Written
during a Residence There in 1842–46 (Cairo: American University Press, 2003).
29. Michel Espagne, Nora Lafi and Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, eds., Silvestre de
Sacy: Le projet européen d’une science orientaliste (Paris: Cerf, 2014).
30. Geoffrey Nash, “Aryan and Semite in Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold’s
Quest for the Religion of Modernity,” Religion and Literature 46:1 (2014): pp.
25–50, p. 3.
31. Ivan Kalmar, “Arabizing the Bible: Racial Supersessionism in Nineteenth
Century Christian Art and Biblical Criticism,” in Orientalism Revisited, ed.
Ian Netton (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 176–186.
32. On the parallel images, in the Christian West of Jews and Muslims, see, for
example, Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003); James Renton and Ben Gidley, eds.,
Antisemitism and Islamophobia: A Shared Story? (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016); Ivan Kalmar and David Penslar, eds. Orientalism and the
Jews (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005); and Kalmar,
Early Orientalism.
33. Joseph Spence, An Essay on Mr. Pope’s Odyssey, in Five Dialogues (London:
Wilmot, 1737), pp. 214–215; Brian Hepworth, Robert Lowth (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1978), pp. 26, pp. 58–69, p. 68.
34. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (New York:
Garland Publications, 1971). The original of this text was a series of Latin
lectures, published in 1753. The English translation was first published in 1787.
The text was annotated by the German philologist Johann David Michaelis.
The opening sentence of Herder’s Spirit of Hebrew Poetry alleges that “every-
one knows Bishop Lowth’s wonderful and widely praised book.” (Vom Geist
der Ebräeischen Poesie, in Rudolph Smend, ed., Johann Gottfried Herder,
Werke in zehn Bänden. Band, 5: Schriften zum alten Testament, 1993), p. 663.
Herder’s work was originally published in 1782–1783.
35. Lowth, Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, p. 19, n.
36. Lowth, Sacred Poetry, p. 362.
37. Previously, the term “Semitic” was limited to language.
38. Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred (London: R. Brimley, 1907 [1847]), p. 319.
39. Viscount de Chateaubriand, Travels to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 2 vols.
(London: Henry Colburn, 1835), 1: p. 1; Alain Guyot, Itinéraire de Paris à
Jérusalem de Chateaubriand: L’invention du voyage romantique (Paris: Presses
de l’Universite Paris-Sorbonne, 2006).
40. Robert Blake, Disraeli’s Grand Tour: Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land,
1830–31 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).
41. Ignaz Goldziher, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary: A Translation and
Psychological Portrait, ed. Raphael Patai (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1987).
42. It is true the most celebrated biblical scholars never set place in the Orient.
The list includes Michaelis’ student Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1753–1827),
conventionally considered the founder of the new biblical criticism, whose
148 ivan kalmar
thesis was on Arab uses of money; Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), who, too,
was an Arabist as well as a daring revisionist of biblical scholarship; and
William Robertson Smith (1846–1894), a professor of Arabic who wrote in
English on both the Bible and Arab customs. However, these armchair experts
relied frequently on the reports of Orient travelers.
43. Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in
Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
44. G. F. W. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sirbee. (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956 [1827]), p. 355.
45. Matt 5:17, King James Version.
46. Harold Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (New York: Riverhead
Books, 2005), p. 13; Kalmar, Early Orientalism, chapter 1.
47. Nash, “Aryan and Semite,” pp. 12–13.
48. The mass occult movement of theosophy frequently employed references to
Aryan kinship, though not always with the antisemitic passion of its offshoot,
“Ariosophy”: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret
Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York
University Press, 1992).
part ii
Development
chapter 8

Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject

Eleanor Byrne

The Disorienting Present

Homi K. Bhabha’s introduction to his collected essays, The Location of
Culture, opens with an apprehension of the moment he is writing from as
one marked by disorientation, with the “posts” of postmodernism, postcoloni-
alism and postfeminism on the one hand and, on the other, the sense of restless
movements, a moving back and forth, “here and there,” that has unhooked
contemporary critical theory from ﬁxed and primary organizational categories
and has produced constellations of ways of being that acknowledge “race,
gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orienta-
tion.”1 The central proposition established in this opening is the argument
that it is “theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, … to think beyond
narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments
or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference.” Much
of what follows reiterates and elaborates on this central interest in the
moments and processes where different experiences and narratives of self,
belonging, nation, community or cultural value meet and are remade, trans-
lated or altered. Bhabha’s interest is in the terms of cultural engagement,
understanding how different positions are negotiated and produced at the
moment of interaction. As such, his argument is that we need to refocus in
order to think about how difference is experienced or mobilized, in an
argument about “where” culture actually is, as indicated by the term “loca-
tion” in his title. In this important conceptual shift, Bhabha seeks to resite an
understanding of culture away from authorized and pre-given forms of
“diversity” that organize around assumptions of a stable self or communities
and posits that culture is always in process, negotiating, the point of its
articulation to an other. Its “location” is to be beyond here and there, to be
disorientingly produced in fraught dialogues or dissident interventions, in
restless revisions that characterize the postal age of postcolonial cultures. As he
argues in virtually all his work, “terms of cultural engagement, whether
antagonistic or afﬁlliative, are produced performatively.” He continues:

151
152 eleanor byrne
“The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of
pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social
articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex on-
going negotiation that seeks to authorise cultural hybridities that emerge in
moments of historical transformation.” It is from this critical position that he
formulates some of his most well-known models for thinking differently
about culture, through the overlapping terms of ambivalence, hybridity and
interstitial, translational subjectivities.
To a great extent, Bhabha’s work from the 1980s hit a receptive postcolonial
audience by bringing poststructuralist theory, notably Derrida’s field-changing
concepts of différance, deconstruction and dissemination, to bear on Said’s
model of Orientalism. As Robert J. C. Young notes, Bhabha combined often-
contradictory theories, seeking aspects of poststructuralism, psychoanalysis
and critical race theory to serve his interrogation of colonial discourse and
the postcolonial present.2 As well as drawing on Lacan’s influential psycho-
analytic theories of subjectivity that were being eagerly used in literary studies
in the late 1980s, he also drew on Foucault and Bakhtin, as well as Julia Kristeva
and later Judith Butler, trying to synthesize and draw in poststructuralist-
inflected theory that was highly influential in this period, to mobilize
and hybridize these diverse theoretical approaches for a revived and non-
identitarian postcolonial theoretical arena. Bhabha’s essays from the mid- to
late 1980s and early 1990s were collected in The Location of Culture in 1994; as
such the essays reflect a number of key moments in the history of cultural
studies, postcolonial theory and the developments in poststructuralist theory
across a number of strands of critical theory during this period. Bhabha also
wrote extensively for journals such as Artforum, moving comfortably into the
field of visual culture and fine art at a time when the art world was rapidly
changing its relation to hierarchies of race and class.
In particular, in much of his work Bhabha considered how best we
might begin to address various forms of what he calls, after Derrida,
“displaced acceleration,” the “exilic” conditions of the present, where a
new international must be sought in
the singular sites of violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, economic
oppression, which must be attentive to the ways in which narratives of
national rootedness in the West need to be taught to remember a displaced
or displaceable population, where nationalist authority is brutally asserted
through dispensing with “others” who are perceived as being pre-modern
and therefore undeserving of nationhood, or basically labelled terroristic
and therefore deemed unworthy of a national home, enemies of the very
idea of a nation peoples.3
Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject 153
Bhabha’s work has participated in ongoing debates about all these issues,
real-world political events, through a medium of what is often called “high
theory,” and his relation to Said is a complex one, to some extent “unli-
kely,” as Said vigorously defended the role of the amateur critic who did
not use technical or obtuse language to communicate ideas, something
Bhabha, and poststructuralist theorizing, has frequently been charged
with. Yet like Said, Bhabha has always found himself performing theore-
tical and critical acrobatics in switching between the deployment of “diffi-
cult” theory and engagement in real-world events, participating for
example in organizing groups of writers and activists around the fatwah
declared on Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses.4
While facing critics who baulk at his “impenetrable prose,” he was also
enthusiastically taken up by artists and writers in the blossoming field of
race and postcolonial theory, collaborated with eminent cultural critics
such as Stuart Hall, as well as with celebrated artists such as Anish Kapoor,
and written many articles relating to transformations in British culture that
engaged with the dynamics of race and nation in the contemporary
moment. If some of his key critical ideas – ambivalence, hybridity, the
Third Space – have swept through the field of cultural theory and post-
colonial studies, it is arguably because he named and attempted to con-
tribute to the concerns of an emerging discipline. His thinking is marked
by an increasing awareness in the fields of postcolonial studies, cultural
studies and feminist scholarship of cultural transformations brought about
by global postwar migrations and cultural and political interventions by
black and ethnic minority groups on a local and global level, and in doing
so he helped artists and writers to articulate the positions they found
themselves in.
Interestingly, whilst one of the major criticisms aimed at his writing has
been their perceived lack of relation to real-world politics (a view that he
actively challenges in his article “The Commitment to Theory”), his
introductory essay in The Location of Culture comes partially from an
exhibition catalogue for a pivotal and controversial biennial exhibition at
the Whitney art gallery in New York in 1993. The exhibition, which
featured many black and minority artists, was negatively reviewed in
many art establishment quarters at the time as “trendily political,” which
one can read as Conservative rhetoric for actually political. Paul Richards’
review for the Washington Post, for example, comments that “its artists all
feel themselves aggrieved. And here they come in their noisy droves, those
martyrs of the margins, the lesbians, the gays, the inhabitants of barrios, the
sufferers of AIDS.”5 Bhabha wrote one of the four exhibition catalogue
154 eleanor byrne
essays, alongside Coco Fusco, Avital Ronnell and B. Ruby Rich. The
exhibition was clearly a watershed moment for establishment art in the
United States as it abruptly broke with models built around complacent
white establishment concepts of greatness and genius. It featured, amongst
many diverse and political works, Daniel J. Martinez’s lapel tag badges
handed to every guest, with the words “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be
white” on them, and George Holliday’s ten-minute videotape of the
Rodney King beating.6 Like Said, Bhabha has juggled political affiliations
alongside his theoretical explorations, and this has involved thinking
beyond identity politics and about alliances, models of intersectionality,
and shared forms of activism and models of community that can facilitate
inclusion whilst being attentive to difference.
As with many of his contemporaries – theorists, writers and artists – and
Said before him, a key part of his attempt to imagine the present differently
was founded on returning to the discourses of colonialism and race of the
nineteenth century, to make meaningful links between racist discourses of
the past and their legacies in the present. While some critiques of Bhabha’s
work have focused on the “textual” nature of his identification of forms of
resistance, he is not merely a historian of colonialism; rather, he seeks to
find a language and a set of tools to name the work and the experiences of
the cultural practitioners of the present across multiple modes of oppres-
sion, race, class, gender, sexuality, outsiderness, illegality, vulnerability and
precarity.

Orientalism, Ambivalence, Hybridity

Psychologically, Orientalism is a form of paranoia, knowledge of
another kind, say, from historical knowledge.7
Said … hints continually at a polarity or division at the very centre of
Orientalism. 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. … [T]his line of thinking is given a
shape analogical to the dreamwork, when Said refers explicitly to a
distinction between “an unconscious positivity” which he terms latent
Orientalism, and the stated knowledges and views about the Orient
which he calls manifest Orientalism.8
Bhabha’s work theorizing colonial discourse influenced a generation of
postcolonial scholars, largely through the widespread discussion and adap-
tation of his key concepts of ambivalence and hybridity. His reading of
interactions between colonizers and colonized peoples resituated Said’s
Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject 155
model of colonial discourse counterintuitively, as something that does not
only facilitate the embedding of colonial systems of power. He does so
through arguing for a kind of “play” inherent in such discourses issuing
from a fundamental irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of
colonialism and Imperialism. Bhabha shares Said’s sense of complicity
and interrelation between Orientalist discourses and political or adminis-
trative systems – modes of maintaining, asserting, showing, displaying and
“having” power – but he argues the knowability of the colonial subject
always eludes colonial discourse, and he proposes that colonial discourse
produces ambivalent, fraught, psychically inflected knowledge and that
such discourse says as much about the colonizer as it does about the
colonized.
Bhabha develops Said’s particular models of discourse analysis in
Orientalism, demonstrating that colonial discourse was not monolithic
but internally riven. Bhabha’s approach is largely influenced by his use of
seminal essays on deconstructive literary theory by Jacques Derrida, who
proposed a deconstructive approach to literary and philosophical texts as a
critique of Western metaphysics that highlighted the ways in which any
text is founded on internal contradictions that reveal its foundations to be
“impossible,” the text working “against itself.” In Derrida’s work, writing
undoes itself, as it holds irreconcilable meanings, and the literary critic can
find in this instability the politics of the text. Derrida’s work clearly
resonates with Bhabha as he thinks through the ways in which colonial
discourses set themselves up as knowledge but register their own profound
instability and illegitimacy at the same time.
Bhabha also uses psychoanalytic literary theory to rethink Said’s descrip-
tion of Orientalism, homing in, in what he calls an “underdeveloped
passage in Said,” on lines that for a reader of Freud are immediately
suggestive:
What is this theory of encapsulation or fixation which moves between the
recognition of cultural and racial difference and its disavowal, by affixing the
unfamiliar to something established, in a form that is repetitious and
vacillates between delight and fear?9
As Robert Young suggests, “Bhabha exploits the ambivalence which Said
denies but nevertheless demonstrates.”10 At the centre of Bhabha’s work we
find a focus on the stereotype that brought the term “ambivalence” into
play as a key mode of reading colonial discourse and the role of the
stereotype in that discourse. Bhabha offers a close reading of what he
terms “the stereotype-as-suture” as a form of fetishistic identification that
156 eleanor byrne
is profoundly split in a number of key ways but is also attempting to knit
together those “splits.”11 By doing so, he is able to see that a colonial text
(indeed any text) is not already self-sufficient in the meanings it contains
but produces resistance as something that it does to itself as form that
produces an internally split meaning, not a clear message that is opposed
from the outside, or at least not only opposed from the outside. Instead, he
is interested in the way that colonial discourse anxiously repeats its stereo-
types, which survive into the present day, partially adapted but largely
intact. Rather than seeing the stereotype as simply inaccurate and empow-
ering to the one doing the stereotyping, he reads, with Derrida in mind,
texts that are as anxious and unstable as they are fixed and certain about the
stereotype they deploy. Bhabha moves away from thinking about stereo-
types as positive or negative and away from a model where stereotypes are
just projections of negative or unwanted aspects of those doing the stereo-
typing. He reflects poststructuralist ideas about narrative and ways of
understanding how meaning is created. The stereotype becomes a fault
line or a way of entry into thinking about colonial discourse itself as split
and ambivalent. The stereotype he argues is a peculiar paradigm for
colonial discourse, a privileged sign, something that denotes a strange,
arrested, mix of desire and hate. Bhabha argues that “the stereotype is not a
simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a
simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that,
in denying the play of difference (which the negation through the Other
permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in
significations of psychic and social relations” (p. 75). Bhabha uses Frantz
Fanon to support this reading, citing Black Skin, White Masks (1952):
“When Fanon talks of the positioning of the subject in the stereotyped
discourse of colonialism, he gives further credence to my point. The
legends, stories, histories and anecdotes of a colonial culture offer the
subject a primordial Either/Or. Either he is fixed in a consciousness of
the body as a solely negating activity or as a new kind of man, a new genus”
(p. 75). Following Freud, we might best understand the stereotype as a
fetish, something that, in questions of sexuality and desire, is a thing that is
a substitute for a lack; one that enables control over a sense of self that is
potentially threatened by a sexual encounter or by desire for an other, by
bringing the object of desire under control.12 Bhabha argues that the
stereotype is similar to the fetish in two ways. Firstly, it is structurally
similar to the fetish, linking something scary (racial and sexual difference
and confrontation with that difference) to something familiar – an object
in the case of the fetish, a stereotype in the case of colonial discourse.
Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject 157
Secondly, because it hovers between figuring difference as an anxiety about
a lack and as an affirmation of completeness, it moves between lack and
completion, and the stereotype bolsters itself by putting itself in the
paradoxical place of an unattainable completion. The stereotype has to
be anxiously repeated forever – even though it is supposed to fix itself to its
subject, to be already known and obvious. Instead it circulates as a bogus
and fetishized form of knowing, but one that Bhabha insists represents its
own anxiety in the ways it circulates and is repeated.
Whilst the subject is “fixed” as something, the things that it is fixed on
can be quite volatile – disorder, sexual misconduct, dirt, drunkenness,
bodily threat, verbal/physical dominance, ugliness – already creating an
odd model of “fixed volatility.” So rather than merely a projection of what
is hated or feared or a source of disgust about the self, it is an index of
colonial discourse itself, and, crucially for Bhabha, it is an index of a desire
that is disavowed. It simultaneously recognizes and disavows difference.
The stereotype, also like the fetish, operates as a kind of metaphor and
metonymy. It is always there to cover a fear and operates as a form of
multiple and contradictory belief. In colonial texts it works to address
moments where the difference of colonial culture and hence its threat to
the colonizer cannot be named; hence, Bhabha notes, “the same old stories
of the Negro’s animality, the Coolie’s inscrutability or the stupidity of the
Irish must be told (compulsively) again and afresh, and are differently
gratifying and terrifying each time” (p. 77).
This sense of internal splitting is also key to Bhabha’s understanding of
colonial discourse as always hybrid, according to Bhabha, because any
attempt to impose or make meanings is always transformed in the moment
of its interaction with its intended recipients. Hybridity is not a problem of
genealogy or identity between two different cultures that can then be
resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of
colonial representation: if “the appearance of the English book is read as a
production of colonial hybridity, then it no longer simply commands
authority. It gives rise to a series of questions of authority that, in my
bastardized repetition, must sound strangely familiar” (p. 113).
Bhabha argues that colonial discourse is always altered when it takes
place at the point of interaction, at the moment where it is interpreted in
some way by the colonized. No colonial discourse remains untouched or
unaffected by this; it is always more or less than itself at the point of
enunciation and reception. In his essay “Signs Taken for Wonders,” he
considers the writings of Indian catechist Anund Messeh in 1817, who
struggles to contain the meanings that proliferate from the readers of Bibles
158 eleanor byrne
he encounters outside Delhi, as they interpret the book given to them, they
say, by “[a]n Angel at Hurdwar fair.”13 Bhabha comments: “The discovery
of the book installs a sign of appropriate representation: the word of God,
truth, art creates the conditions for the beginning, a practice of history and
narrative. But the institution of the word in the wilds is also an Entstellung,
a process of displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition – the dazzling
light of literature sheds only areas of darkness” (p. 105). Entstellung would
name a kind of defacement, or disfiguring, that takes place as the colonial
text “takes place” in the colony.
Colonial literature, such as R. L. Stevenson’s short story “The Bottle
Imp,” written for a Polynesian readership while in Samoa then translated
with missionary help, suffers much the same fate. The interpretation and
morals extracted from his story by his Samoan readers, as Stevenson’s wife
Fanny notes, reflects the profoundly hybrid condition of the colonial
literary text. “I do not understand what civilizing effect the story of The
Bottle Imp was supposed to have on the natives, but I cannot think it quite
fulfilled the expectations of the missionary who translated it […] Samoans
are in the habit of speaking in parables; they found many different morals
in the Bottle Imp, some very ingeniously extracted.”14 “The Bottle Imp” is
saturated with colonial assumptions about the Polynesian readership and
their needs, and the role of the colonizer, but also illustrates Bhabha’s
point, which is a poststructuralist one: hybridity shifts the power of the
text; it questions discursive authority and suggests, contrary to Said’s
Orientalism, that colonial discourse is not “in control” of its meanings.
Discourse only operates as the moment of being interpreted, where it
“lands,” and as such there is always an element of reversal or compromise
or interpretation.
Said illustrates something similar in his humorous account of his educa-
tion, when he relates his experiences of growing up in colonial Egypt,
attending Victoria College in Cairo, in his memoir Out of Place (1999). The
education system is entirely imported from England, the school is designed
to be “the Eton of the Middle East,” and “except for the teachers of Arabic
and French, the faculty was entirely English (not a single English student
was enrolled) … Being and speaking Arabic were delinquent activities at
VC and accordingly we were never given proper instruction in our lan-
guage, history, culture and geography. We were tested as if we were English
boys, trailing behind an ill defined and always out of reach goal from class
to class, year to year.”15 Whilst Said doesn’t employ the vocabulary of
mimicry or ambivalence, he does demonstrate the ways in which the
colonial education system was subverted by his classmates during an
Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject 159
English lesson on Twelfth Night; “Gately [the teacher] asked us to read out
loud and explain various lines in the first scene but achieved only raucous
laughter, incomprehensible gibberish and horrendous Arabic obscenities
presented as ‘classical’ equivalents of what the Duke of Illyria was saying”
(p. 182).

Mimicry and Menace

As with his work on the stereotype, Bhabha takes up the question of
colonial mimicry – the desire of the colonizer for a recognizable and
controllable other who is a kind of copy of the colonizer and has
internalized colonial power systems – in order to mobilize what may
seem an initially unpromising aspect of colonial culture and power
from which to seek dissidents and resistance. Whilst mimicry is
presented as disabling for the colonized, a tool for producing a lack
of center and self for the colonized subject, Bhabha returns to this
demand from colonial power for a fixed and recognizable other to
destabilize the model and think it differently. “Colonial mimicry,” he
argues, “is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject
of a difference that is almost the same but not quite. That is to say
that discourse of mimicry is constructed around ambivalence; in order
to be effective it must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its
difference.”16
Bhabha’s explorations of the importance of a kind of disavowed mimicry
for the colonizer looks at how the purported civilizing mission of British
colonial expansion finds itself crossed by an anxiety – that too substantial a
level of cultural and social reform would risk producing subjects that might
then organize for or fight for their liberty. Charles Grant, a Scot who was
chairman of the British East India Company, in “Observations on the state
of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain” (1792) argued for a
“partial reform” and partial diffusion of Christianity, following a desire to
create mimic men who adhere to British Christian values but are not free
subjects. “Inadvertently Grant produces a knowledge of Christianity as a
form of social control which conflicts with the enunciatory assumptions that
authorize his discourse” (p. 87) as well as Thomas Babington Macaulay’s
famous “Minute on Education” of 1835, which was, Bhabha argues, deeply
influenced by this work. Macaulay notoriously comments on the relative
values of an entire Oriental education versus the higher value he would put
on a single primer of English literature, thus inaugurating the teaching of
English to an Indian elite by the East India Company.
160 eleanor byrne
Mimicry – of manners, customs, clothing, language and schooling –
answers to a desire for an approved and controllable other who is never
quite as good as the original in the colonizers’ view: “Almost the same but
not ‘white,’” as Bhabha comments, adapting the Freudian phrase “almost
the same but not quite” (p. 89). Mimicry, such as copying the wearing of a
suit, as Dr. Aziz does in E. M. Forster’s bitter critique of Anglo-India A
Passage to India (1924), demonstrates the way in which Aziz is seen as a
“poor copy” of the English when his collar button is noted as being
missing. Yet the scene where Aziz fixes his collar stud into Fielding’s collar,
an act of homoerotic symbolic intimacy, which involves the “undressing”
of Aziz who passes his stud to Fielding, demonstrates it is actually he who
maintains the illusion of Fielding’s superiority in the eyes of others. Aziz’s
hospitality and generosity are reframed as the sloppy standards of the
colonial subject, because this scene is hidden from public view. As the
mimic man who always gets something a little wrong, Aziz is always aware
of the politics of this dynamic; in the immediate aftermath of the lending
of the collar stud, he moves the terms of discussion away from where
Fielding would have it.
“Why the hell does one wear collars at all?” grumbled Fielding as he bent his
neck.
“We wear them to pass the Police.”
“What’s that?”
“If I’m biking in English dress – starch collar, hat with ditch – they take
no notice. When I wear a fez, they cry, ‘Your lamp’s out!’ Lord Curzon did
not consider this when he urged natives of India to retain their picturesque
costumes.”17

While Fielding wonders idly about the quirks of English fashion and the
inconveniences of the collar, Aziz points to the policing of a type of
mimicry as a prerequisite for avoiding persecution and everyday harass-
ments. Aziz knows only too well the role of the mimicry in colonial India;
as Bhabha notes, following Lacan, “mimicry is like camouflage, not har-
monization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that
differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically”
(p. 85). In “Sly Civility,” Bhabha builds on this troubled relation between
colonizer and colonized as he proposes the self-defeating will for authority
that tips narcissistic will to power into the paranoia of those in power, a
“desire for authorization in the face of a process of cultural differentiation
which makes it problematic to fix the native objects of colonial power as
the moralized others of truth” (p.100). However, Bhabha argues that the
Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject 161
act of mimicry disturbs a straightforward relationship between original and
copy, drawing attention to the way in which the so-called original is a
performance, thus unhooking it from a straightforward relationship with
the natural.
The central preoccupation of A Passage to India, the accusation and
trial of Aziz for the attempted rape of the visiting English woman
Adela Quested, affords Forster with an opportunity to explore what
Bhabha calls “the forked tongue” of post-Enlightenment colonial
discourse. After the incident at the Marabar Caves, the British gather
in their club to rehearse a series of racist discourses, stereotypes and
fears associated with British rule in India and the ambivalent claim to
power they hold. In Forster’s narrative, fragments and murmurs from
the couples grouped there are interspersed with thoughts of the
Collector:
He wanted to flog every native that he saw, but to do nothing that would
lead to a riot or to the necessity for military intervention. … The others, less
responsible, could behave naturally. They had started speaking of “women
and children” – that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has
been repeated a few times … “They ought to be compelled to give hostages,”
etc. … “Station a bunch of Ghurkhas at the entrance of the cave was all that
was wanted.”18
Fear of the natives is quickly rephrased by a drunken subaltern; the white
community appear bunkered down, on a war footing, rehearsing older,
long-held, archaic fears of rebellion, taking them back to 1857 and imagi-
natively conjuring the power structures of police, law, armed forces to
avenge themselves of the fantasized collusion of the Indian men against the
white women. Bhabha notes in “Sly Civility” the common trope of para-
noia, in which the delusion of the end of the world functions as a sort of
permanent apocalyptic formulation that underpins the discourses of
British colonial presence in India. The rhetorical mobilization of impend-
ing apocalypse, which has a lot in common with Slavoj Zizek’s account of
the “tyrant’s bloody robe,” is the stage upon which a peculiar “perfor-
mance” of colonial ambivalence takes place among the whites holed up in
their club:
“Mrs Blakison was saying if only there were a few Tommies,” remarked
someone.
“English no good,” he [drunken subaltern] cried, getting his loyalties
mixed. “Native troops for this country. Give me the sporting type of native,
give me Ghurkhas, give me Rajputs, give me Jats, give me the Punjabi, give
162 eleanor byrne
me Sikhs, give me Marathas, Bhils, Afridis, and Pathans, and really, if it
comes to that, I don’t mind if you give me the scum of the bazaars. Properly
led, mind, I’d lead them anywhere –” (p. 191)
Other members of the club assert that it is the mimic man who represents
the most trusted and paradoxically least trusted form of colonized Indian:
“The native’s alright if you get him alone. Lesley! Lesley! You remember
the one I had a knock with on your maidan last month. Well, he was all
right. Any native who plays polo is all right. What you’ve got to stamp on is
these educated classes, and, mind, I do know what I’m talking about this
time” (p. 192). The native Indian is both completely readable and unread-
able, is predictable and has only the basest of instincts, ones that are only
superficially erased by appearance, style of speech, education.
Bhabha argues that in moments in which the role of difference as threat
or menace to colonial culture cannot be named, fetishistic nonsense is
produced, such as the club discussion, because of the anomalous role of the
colonies. This is something that Sara Suleri broadly agrees with in her
discussion of English discourses of India. “If the limits of cultural knowl-
edge dictate the curious genealogy of English India, then its chronology is
intimately linked with a failure of ignorance to comprehend itself, or to
articulate why the boundary of culture must generate such intransigent
fears.”19 This “unreadability,” Suleri suggests, fetishized a colonial fear of
its own cultural ignorance into the potential threats posed by an Indian
alterity (p. 7). At the end of this chapter in the English club, Fielding is
forced to choose sides; he can’t participate in the paranoia and propaganda,
the rehearsal of colonial ambivalence and xenophobia, matched with a
condescending and hypocritical attachment to the colonized that this
meeting has produced. He must refuse the nonsense of colonial discourse
and see beyond it to the real social relations that have produced the hysteria
and paranoia of the ruling class.
The same problem occurs in the desire for an approved version of the
other that is created in colonial contexts through a desire for a creation of
mimicry. As Ronnie says to Adela later, after this meeting at the club, “So
you won’t go saying he’s innocent again, will you? For every servant I’ve
got is a spy” (p. 209). Ronnie demonstrates Bhabha’s key phrase; the look
of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined (p. 89). As
Robert Young notes, the question of whether the “native” hates the
colonizer is not just a question of projection and paranoia on their part.
The colonizer’s perception “he hates me” is not the overinterpretation of
paranoia, therefore, but an interpretation that is entirely correct.20 The
Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject 163
problem comes in not knowing when, how and from whom to detect the
difference between subservient obedience and “sly civility.”
It is this colonial nonsense that Bhabha sees as metonymically figured by
the events in the Marabar caves; the “Oboum,” the echo seemingly without
origin, was started by a tiny scrape on the wall, a touch, producing an
exorbitant, exaggerated, and endless and repeating copy that resounded in
an inscrutable way both in the caves themselves and in Adela Quested’s
head. For Bhabha this dramatizes an enactment of an undecidable,
uncanny colonial present, which dramatizes “a play between colonial desire
and colonial memory” that Bhabha links to “a narrative uncertainty of
culture’s in-between” (p. 127), a kind of enunciatory disorder, which bears
strong similarity to Derrida’s model of undecidability which arises from an
inability to impose a unified reading on events that took place.

The Postcolonial Present

In “Adagio,” his contribution to the collection of essays Edward Said:
Continuing the Conversation, which he and W. J. T. Mitchell edited in
memory of Said, Bhabha recalls a formative moment in his relation to
Said’s work.21 As a graduate student, reading a discussion between Said and
Gauri Viswanathan about Harold Bloom’s Diacritics, he detected a sudden
shift of tone in which Said “admits to performing a kind of acrobatics
between parallel lives, as avant-garde critic and Palestinian exile.” This
struck a chord with Bhabha’s sense of wrestling with his own conflicted
beginnings. “I immediately identified with the precariousness of Said’s
acrobatics, and learnt much from his ability to be otherwise engaged both
politically and philosophically, yet to be capable of a critical assessment
that was free and fair.”22 For Bhabha, grappling with his study of V. S.
Naipaul, Said spoke to the quandary he found himself in: how to derive
important diagnostic insights from Naipaul while navigating Naipaul’s
political opinions on the history of the Third World “that can be provo-
cative and offensive” (p. 9). Bhabha suggests that Said modeled a kind of
“critical distance” that enabled him to mine Naipaul’s insights into “the
psychic and affective structures that inform the politics of everyday life as it
is lived in the midst of the protocols of colonial power and its contest of
cultures” while still vigorously resisting as morally and politically objec-
tionable, “as I do and Said certainly did” (p. 9), Naipaul’s ideological
positions. Naipaul is an unlikely point of contact between the two theor-
ists. Bhabha is referencing Said’s well-known distaste for Naipaul’s nega-
tive and unsympathetic accounts of newly independent postcolonial
164 eleanor byrne
nations and their cultures, Yet, as Said notes, Naipaul’s subject was
“extraterritoriality – the state of being neither here nor there, but rather,
in-between things that cannot come together for him.”23 The concept of
in-betweenness was taken up by Bhabha and mobilized as a key term in his
critical lexicon for his model of how subject and cultures are formed. As he
proposes: “It is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and
displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and
collective experiences of nationness, community interest or cultural value
are negotiated.”24 Subjects are then formed “in-between” or in excess of the
sum of the “parts” of difference, that we might consider to be stabilized or
knowable categories of race, gender, class, ethnicity. They are produced at
the moment of interface or exchange or, as in Naipaul’s case, find them-
selves caught or fraught, sometimes in belated times and places, engaging
in liminal and hybrid cultural interfaces with others as part of the post-
colonial condition that forms the subject. “Cultures,” Bhabha asserts,
“come to be represented by virtue of the process of iteration and
translation through which their meanings are very vicariously addressed
to – through – an Other. This erases any essentialist claims for the inherent
authenticity or purity of cultures.”25 It is this “location” of culture, made
possible through iteration, through the other, that informs his rethinking
of Said’s work in Orientalism, yet, as this tribute to Said’s work shows, he
credits his professional and personal relationship with Said’s thinking and
literary analysis with having enabled him to read more effectively, provid-
ing him with “a critical terrain and an intellectual project.”26

Notes
1. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
2. Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London:
Routledge, 1990), p. 141.
3. Homi Bhabha, “Foreword,” in Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the
Politics of Place, Hamid Naﬁcy (London: Routledge, 1999), p. x.
4. Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, eds., The Rushdie File (London: Fourth
Estate, 1989).
5. See www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/03/04/scrawling-in-the-mar
gins/8ee1f262-ef29-41dc-b03d-0ba2e49f64d2/?utm_term=.58d3ad7f1bfc (accessed
March 12, 2019).
6. See www.vulture.com/2016/04/identity-politics-that-forever-changed-art
.html (accessed March 12, 2019).
7. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 72.
8. Bhabha, Location, p. 71.
Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject 165
9. Bhabha, Location, p. 73
10. Young, White Mythologies, p. 151.
11. Bhabha, Location, p. 75
12. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” [1927], in On Sexuality, Pelican Freud Library
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 7: pp. 351–357.
13. Bhabha, Location, p. 103.
14. Fanny Stevenson, “Prefatory Note” to R. L. Stevenson, Island Nights
Entertainments, Tusitala edition, vol. 8, pp. xii–xiii. Cited in R. L.
Stevenson, South Sea Tales, ed. Rosyln Jolly (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
15. Edward W. Said, Out of Place (London: Granta, 1999), p. 198.
16. Bhabha, Location, p. 86.
17. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 83.
18. Forster, A Passage to India, pp. 190–191.
19. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), p. 2.
20. Young, White Mythologies, p. 151.
21. Homi K. Bhabha, “Adagio,” in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation,
eds. Homi K. Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004)
22. Bhabha, “Adagio,” p. 8.
23. Edward W. Said, “Bitter Dispatches from the Third World,” in
Reﬂections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London:
Granta, 2000), pp. 98–104, p. 99.
24. Bhabha, Location, p. 2.
25. Bhabha, Location, p. 58.
26. Bhabha, Location, p. xxvi.
chapter 9

The Harem: Gendering Orientalism

Reina Lewis

Much of the work that sought to redress the masculinist approach of Said’s
original polemic Orientalism took the harem as a starting point. The
harem1 – and its mobile corollary the veil2 – was, I argued in 1996, the
pivot of the Western Orientalist fantasy.3 While many accepted Said’s
central tenet that Orientalist knowledges and cultural forms served to
produce a situational superiority for the West in which the East was
rendered as feminized, supine, civilizationally inferior and available for
(imperial and capitalist) penetration, the gendered presumptions and
exclusions which underlay Said’s formula have in the last four decades
come under sustained and fruitful investigation.4 Said himself began to
address gender more directly in his subsequent volume Culture and
Imperialism.5
This essay reflects on some key points of theoretical and methodological
interest that have arisen in the now large and diverse fields of feminist and
postcolonial cultural and historical studies of Orientalism. It is my con-
tention that we consider the historicity of studies of Orientalism post-Said
as part of the development of interconnecting research areas and forms of
cultural and political activism. These areas of activity in and out of the
academy are shaped by micro and macro political events, including the
advent of neoliberal globalized late capitalism. In relation to the harem and
veiling in particular, studies and creative practice are resituated post-
Orientalism by new articulations and understandings of gender, ethnicity,
class, religion and sexuality.
The Western fantasy of a sequestered, sexualized domain was often
based on the model of the Ottoman imperial serail in Constantinople.6
This model of seclusion was not only about women and sexuality; the
imperial harem served to ensure imperial power through managing access
to the secluded body of the sultan at the apex of a widespread household-
office model of governance. In this context, as Peirce has discussed, women
of the imperial family living in harem seclusion at times wielded – and were
166
The Harem: Gendering Orientalism 167
known to wield – immense power,7 with women of the elite in lesser degree
also able to exert influence through their segregated networks. Melding
research on the historic harem and its representation with new currents in
the understanding of gender and sexuality, Peirce also reminds scholars
that:
The spectrum of Middle Eastern sexualities was not limited to female and
male. The biological sex binary was both undermined and reinforced by the
indeterminate sexualities of transvestites, eunuchs, and hermaphrodites.
What these groups shared was an association with the boundaries estab-
lished by sacralised, imperialised, and/or gendered space.8

As Lad elaborates, eunuchs played a central role in the maintenance of

architectural and social divisions that governed the imperial harem’s inter-
nal and external boundaries.9 Like other types of slaves and manumitted
slaves/servants, eunuchs remained a feature of non-imperial segregated
households into the twentieth century and feature in women’s accounts
of their harem lives.
Critical approaches to harem representation have been informed by
the development of queer theory in the 1990s and the more recent
transgender theory and activism in the 2000s. In the same way,
attention to women’s participation in cultural forms previously rele-
gated to the status of “minor” or middlebrow, such as memoir,
popular fiction, photography and periodicals, has added also to the
validation of forms of “history from below” in the understanding of
the imperial record and the conceptualization of literary and art
historical canons. Similarly, the development in the last two decades
of a largely women-led Muslim modest fashion industry and related
fashion media in print and online brings new modes of cultural
creativity and mass media participation into the frame.
None of this is without contestation: reviewing publications in prepara-
tion for this article, I was struck afresh by how “live” the field is, and I
present my observations in the mode of “work in progress.” This may seem
at odds with the aspiration to being definitive that conventionally accom-
panies the honour of writing for a Cambridge series, but – in a still mobile
field, and especially at a time when wars and conflicts in, and understood to
be related to, the regions known as the “Orient” are marking and ruining
lives around the globe, and in which the renewed attention to the figure of
the veiled and unveiled woman has been central to political debate on all
sides – the need persists for scholarly and political dialogue that allows us to
revise our opinions, to hear those of others and to engage in hard thinking.
168 reina lewis
The “Real” Harem and the Women who Lived There: Finding
Traces, Identifying Sources
In riposte to the mainly male-produced sources under consideration in
Orientalism, scholars turned attention to cultural forms created by women
in a shift away from a focus on images of women, demanding that women’s
role in histories of imperialism and of resistance be included. Early exam-
inations of gender and Orientalism were supported by feminist studies on
how the intersection of class with imperial and colonial processes of
racialization played a structural role in the construction of white, as well
as black and minority ethnic, gender and sexual identities in the West.10
The gender discrimination in the West that positioned even elite women as
peripheral to formal imperial power did not mean that they did not
participate in or benefit from imperialized relations at home and abroad:
in Britain, as in the USA, suffrage and feminist campaigns in the nine-
teenth century relied overtly on imperialized claims to racial (and class)
civilizational superiority.
In relation to Orientalism specifically, the development of arguments
about the mutually constituting role of the social categories gender, race
and class, and the variable ways in which Western women were able to
access Saidian positions of superiority in relation to the Orient, came back
time and again to the harem. Understood within the logic of Orientalism
as the one place in which Western women had an advantage over Western
men, women’s presumed ability to claim to see into the sequestered harem
domain could be a valuable asset. Able to augment men’s accounts,
Western women – from Lady Mary Montagu in the early eighteenth
century onward11 – leveraged their presumed gendered access to create
interest and market for their accounts. For women living in Islamicate
societies,12 especially during processes of modernization and anticolonial-
ism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the segregations of
harem and veiling were also often central to campaigns for gender and
social equality at home (as also for progressive men).13 For women classified
as “Oriental,” the harem and the veil set the terms for their interventions
into Western discourse, providing their unique selling point of exoticized
difference. In the diverse modernities of the “Muslim world,” the image of
the Muslim woman – veiled, unveiled, sequestered or “free” – continued to
frame and be fought over in internal national and regional understandings
of nation and society.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the stereotype of the odalisque,
the oppressed yet sexualized inmate of the Oriental harem, continues to
The Harem: Gendering Orientalism 169
structure rescue narratives of civilizational alterity that inform attitudes to
contemporary Muslim women and men. In the colonial era, as Spivak
famously described in relation to India, systemic colonial violence was
cloaked in a rescue narrative (concerning for example sati) framed as “white
men are saving brown women from brown men.”14 Today, Razak argues,
this formula is repurposed through postcolonial Western renditions of
Muslim alterity into the twinned figures of the “imperilled Muslim
woman” and the “dangerous Muslim man” – a mode of governance
based on the construction of Muslims as a religiously defined civilizational
other that extends the West’s “ongoing management of racial popula-
tions,”15 obscuring, as Heffernan argues, “the rationalist aspects of Islam
and the religious aspects of Western [Enlightenment] reason.”16
For women from Western and Eastern cultures, Muslim and non-
Muslim, the desire to present the reality of harem and veiling experience
has been a recurrent preoccupation. Different attitudes to the evidential
basis of women’s sources and to the ideological impact of women’s inter-
ventions has been central to critical debates about women’s Orientalism.
Mills early pointed out that one of the reasons why white Western
women’s travel writing was ignored by cultural historians was that their
demonstration of allegiance to the imperial project was often patchy – the
result of their experience of partial access to forms of racialized imperial
power.17 For Yeğenoğlu, the citational nature of women’s Orientalism
keeps it within the Orientalist frame.18 Others discuss the ambivalence
and collusion along with the contestatory potential of Western women’s
accounts,19 focusing on the shifting power relationships between Western
and Eastern women in the contact zone, to use Pratt’s term,20 of harem
interactions. Scholars newer to the field balk at the binarisms that struc-
tured Said’s account and contest their invocation in follow-up studies as
forms of essentialism.21
That many historical Orientalist sources do construct a binary divide
between East and West is a matter of record. So too is the contemporary
revitalization of essentialized binaries in the clash of civilizations thesis
mobilized to justify the war in Afghanistan to rescue Afghan women from
(presumed Taliban-imposed) burqas.22 But critical responses do not have
to reinscribe binary views in the analysis of such material. It is to be
expected that earlier research maintained binary visions; this is common
to other recuperative histories concerned with gender, or race/ethnicity, or
sexuality. Feminist art history had first to “find” the women missing from
the historical record before art historians were able to develop complex
analyses of if and how the gendered point of origin determines the form
170 reina lewis
and reception of visual artifacts. As in feminist literary criticism, this
process of criticality has had to respond to several shifts in the conceptual-
ization of woman and of gender as historicized and located social cate-
gories. Historiographically, the sensitive endeavor of creating minority
histories, as in the reconsideration of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of
Loneliness as a trans rather than proto-lesbian narrative, can unseat pre-
viously treasured reclamations.23 In relation to the harem, and to critical
approaches to gender and Orientalism, as layers of research build on an
ever-expanding set of resources, the complexity of gendered experience of
the harem’s socializing spatiality has come fruitfully to encompass multiple
approaches and analyses.
Feminist interventions into debates about Orientalism focusing on the
harem and the veil have followed two interconnected tracks. One provides
information about the harem as the historic physical space in which many
women and children (including many non-Muslims) lived within
Islamicate segregating societies, drawing on historical and sociological
research from Middle Eastern women’s studies.24 A picture emerged of
the harem as a spatial device of household organization partnered with
forms of dress – under the rubric veiling – that, as Mernissi argued
schematically, aimed to extend the “protection” of the harem beyond the
physical space of the segregated household.25 Writing about the spatiality
of contemporary veiling fashions, cultural geographer Secor’s concept of
veiling regimes also helps understand historically how clothing has pro-
jected the harem’s gender-segregated social relations onto bodies beyond
those who live in, work in or visit harems. Operating within and beyond
the space of the harem, veiling regimes are “spatially realized sets of
hegemonic rules and norms regarding women’s veiling, which are them-
selves produced by specific constellations of power” and which vary in
terms of “formality, enforcement, stability, and contestation.”26
Historical research has provided details and images of different types of
veils worn by Muslim and other religious and religio-ethnic communities
and has tracked changing fashions in the forms of garments and types of
cover, as well as the enactment and – always uneven – implementation of
sumptuary legislation.27 From its pre-Islamic beginning, veiling has often
served to secure and signal social status rather than only or primarily
identifying religion or expressing personal piety. The veil has been a
form of fashionable display with potential to enhance family status (or
threaten family honor), and it has served as individual self-fashioning in
the context of regional nationalisms and modernities and postmodernities
in contexts of Muslim minority and diaspora life.
The Harem: Gendering Orientalism 171
The second strand of feminist research analyses the development and use
of the harem and the veiled/unveiled woman as tropes within imperial and
anticolonial cultures and discourses. This continued chronologically to
evaluate how the figure of woman – veiled and unveiled – remained central
to the articulation of regional nationalisms and self-imaging of postcolo-
nial states. Shifting policies about revealing and concealing the female body
impacted variably on women during the course of a lifetime and across
generations.28 These approaches provide insights into how stereotypes
about Oriental women have historically played a major role in the devel-
opment of Occidental attitudes to racialized and religious difference at
home and abroad, as well as in the self-representation of “Oriental”
societies and their diverse populations.
The methodological inspiration that Orientalism provided – to “study
the interrelations between society, history, and textuality”29 – contained
from the start the potential for research into diverse forms of textuality.
Providing historical accounts of segregated life, like other projects of
restorative history (queer, women’s, black), often requires the use of
previously disregarded sources to track the histories, lives lived, of those
not conventionally memorialized. Recuperative histories also often require
the assertion of the validity of different, sometimes minor-register, cultural
and material sources as worthy of serious scholarly attention.
Feminist responses to Orientalism mounted new analyses of canonical
texts within literature and other dominant Western cultural forms and
brought new types of source and practices into the purview of scholarly
attention. Characterized by interdisciplinarity, discussions about the
harem and veiling were not simply additive – providing new examples in
different genres or forms or looking at sources created by women rather
than by men. In aggregate, feminist responses to Said changed the way the
field was conceptualized in terms of sources and analysis. Historical studies
of the harem dovetailed with research on the wider class take-up of
gendered imperial popular and commercial cultures30 and engaged with
widening understandings of the extent to which Orientalism might be seen
to have provided “inspiration”31 across art and design rather than being
regarded solely within a frame of cultural appropriation or imperializing
will.32
Research in the years since Orientalism has established alternative
“canons” of women artists, elevating to serious critical attention major
minor figures such as Henriette Browne and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann
and re-shaping the contours of histories of travel literature by bringing to
light the many voices and different strains of harem literature, now
172 reina lewis
established as a subgenre in its own right. If early women’s accounts were
by aristocratic women like Lady Montagu, the nineteenth century saw an
increase in middle-class women visiting the Orient. Most initially traveled
to accompany male relatives, as with Sophia Lane Poole, who traveled to
Egypt in 1833 with her brother, the explorer Edward William Lane; her
travelogue The Englishwoman in Egypt (1844) was, she tells her readers,
specifically commissioned by her brother to provide additional informa-
tion on harem life such as “was only accessible to a lady.”33 Subsequent
technological and market advances brought journeys to the Middle East
within the realm of possibility for middle-class women. Traveling in
growing numbers, many women, such as Emmeline Lott,34 were employed
as governesses in royal and elite harems; others served as missionaries, often
teaching in the missionary schools to which the progressive Middle Eastern
elite were sending their daughters by the fin de siècle. Each occupation
created further opportunities to publish observations of Oriental – largely
female – life.35
As Melman demonstrated, women’s accounts of a wider range of house-
holds visited particularized the harem, domesticating the fantasy stereotype
with details of more modest homes and a varied range of social encounters.
With Murray’s 1847 guidebook institutionalizing the harem visit as a tour-
istic must-see, by 1871 Annie Jane Harvey was reporting that “every year it is
more difficult for passing travellers to gain admittance to the harems.”36
Though the interaction with Western visitors could create opportunities, as I
discuss further on in this chapter, Ottoman women record frustration at
entertaining foreigners, especially when local distinctions of rank were not
regarded by the increasingly less elite Western visitor as noted by Musbah
Haidar – herself of elevated status as a sherifa of Mecca.37
Western women evaluated the gender relations of segregated life in
relation to their own changing concerns: the aristocratic Lady Mary
Montagu emphasized that, unlike women in Britain, Muslim women
were able to inherit property; middle-class women in the nineteenth
century seized on domestic conventions allowing Muslim wives to refuse
their husbands entry to their chambers.38 Running alongside women’s
occasional envy for the advantages of some elements of Islamic gender
conventions was a recurrent emphasis on the superiority of Western
civilizational norms. Identifying a long-running strand of feminist
Orientalism within Western women’s poetry and fiction, Zonana demon-
strates how white Western women used Orientalist stereotypes of sexual-
ized slavery in the harem metaphorically to counter the incipient
despotism they faced from Western men.39
The Harem: Gendering Orientalism 173
Ottoman women themselves began to challenge Western stereotypes
about harem life from the late nineteenth century, as female literacy – often
in European languages – increased in the region.40 Elite women, like the
Ottoman author Melek Hanoum in 187241 and Emily Said-Ruette from
Zanzibar in 1888,42 began to produce memoirs and what we might now call
“faction” for consumption at home and abroad. In the early twentieth
century, as the quantity of Western women’s harem literature peaked,
Western readers could read (in English, French and German) accounts
penned by a generation of Ottoman women who witnessed, and contrib-
uted to, the transition from the multigenerational polygynous harem
household to the smaller apartments of the nucleated family. As seen in
the memoirs of the Ottoman-Turkish feminist, novelist and politician
Halidé Edib,43 the shift away from the sequestered world of eunuchs and
slaves into companionate nuclear family life came to mark personal mod-
ernity for the progressive Ottoman and regional elite.44 Demands
for women’s emancipation were instrumentalized in movements for pro-
gressive social change. An emphasis on (limited) women’s rights, often
emblematized by forms of unveiling, was characteristic of Egyptian anti-
colonialism and early nationalism,45 as in Ottoman campaigns against
sultanic repression. The visibilization of the modern unveiled woman
continued in the gender reforms of the early Turkish Republic after 1923,
though the state’s top-down approach to social change displaced and
suppressed previously autonomous Ottoman women’s organizations.
During the last years of Western and Ottoman imperial rule in the
Middle East, North Africa and the Arabian peninsula, the developing
women’s press, the nationalist press and the growing market for memoir,
fiction and popular literature provided opportunities for the dissemination
of women’s work and often for nascent careers in literature and politics.46
As literacy rates increased and publication modes diversified, women of
Muslim and other religio-ethnic backgrounds were increasingly able to
discuss and dispute the relative merits of different models of gender,
domesticity and society. More recent research finds ways to track the
lives of non-elite and enslaved women, providing further detail for
the emerging picture of gender relations and living arrangements in the
region.47
As a genre, harem literature foregrounded accounts of cross-cultural
exchange. Harem encounters between Western and Middle Eastern
women sometimes brought new examples of the genre into being, as
when British feminist Grace Ellison brokered publications for Zeyneb
Hanoum and Melek Hanoum, the pen names of the two Ottoman sisters
174 reina lewis
who had been the inspiration for Pierre Loti’s 1906 novel Les
Desenchantées.48 Women’s contribution to harem literature and travel
literature crossed disciplinary and media divides, with women artists
illustrating (and sometimes writing their own) travel accounts.49 With
Orientalist stereotypes prevailing through the twentieth century and into
the twenty-first, harem literature continued to be a field of literary endea-
vor for women, seen in the crossover work of Moroccan sociologist Fatima
Mernissi’s “memoir” telling a version of her segregated childhood in
Morocco50 or in the more recent popular literature format of journalists’
accounts of their experiences in the Middle East and the Gulf – mirrored
also by the near-endless appetite of newspapers for the inevitably sensa-
tionalist, even when well-meaning, formula of “my day in a veil/burqa”
commissioned from non-Muslim women reporters.

Sexuality and Desire: Fantasy and Power

The sensationalist nature of Western interest in the harem and the veil was
well known to women from the Middle East and other segregating socie-
ties: “delete for ever that misunderstood word ‘harem,’ and speak of us in
our Turkish ‘homes’” was the cri de coeur from Halidé Edib relayed by
Grace Ellison on her visit to Constantinople in 1913.51 In the final quarter of
the century, as researchers responded to Orientalism, feminists were still
trying to debunk the sexualized stereotype of the harem as a brothel-like
domain in which one man – generally elevated in Western eyes to the status
of sultan – despotically controlled and had sexual access to a multitude of
women. Noting the relative rarity of polygyny (in decline already by the
1880s),52 research repositioned the stereotype of the isolated harem as a
familial and social domain in which women lived with multigenerational
extended family members: a permeable space whose boundaries fostered
visits from friends and encompassed trade, work and welfare activities that
took women’s influence beyond the segregated domain.
As Melman noted, matters of sexuality were not absent from women’s
representations; narratives of family life often centered on social and sexual
reproduction, focusing on maternity, child-rearing, marriage and divorce.
For Roberts, the “prosaic narrative of the harem as a social realm” can itself
serve as a “catalyst” for exotic female fantasy.53 In the contact zone of the
harem visit, when women often did not speak the same language, the
mutual display and exchange of clothing and adornment (sometimes
dressing each other up in each other’s outfits) inserted, she argues,
Western women into the visuality of the harem. This key element of
The Harem: Gendering Orientalism 175
women’s ethnographic reportage allowed them to depict themselves as the
object of the Ottoman women’s gaze. This makes an important adjunct to
the viewing strategy analyzed in Nochlin’s foundational art historical
response to Said, which argued that the structure and technique of
Orientalist paintings (like those of French artist Gérôme) obscured rather
than foregrounded the presence of Western observers to the scene.54
Gérôme, and others, Nochlin proposed, presented the Oriental scene
and peoples as tableaux of exotica in which the viewing position of the
unseen artists hid the Western – putatively heterosexual male – viewer of
the painting, who was able therefore to take a prurient interest in the scenes
depicted without being seen as party to them. This convention was harder
to achieve, I had argued, for women artists, whose presence in the harem
was the guarantor of value for their presumed-to-be-realistic accounts, in a
context where Western women’s art inevitably faced a gender-specific
reception. I had also argued that literature allowed more flexibility than
painting, because when Western women’s harem literature did directly
invoke the perverse sexualities associated with the stereotypical harem,
women authors were able to draw on the conventions of third-person
reporting, presenting unrespectable events at one remove, rather than as
the direct – and potentially compromising – experience of first-person
witness.55 This initially left me with a dilemma about those Western
women artists whose work did appear overtly sexualized, in relation to
which subsequently I have been able to develop my thinking through
engagement with research on the history of non-Western sexualities and
approaches which reintroduce into the harem not only the sexuality of
human relations but also of women’s fantasy.
Roberts finds that Western women’s depictions of themselves being
handled and scrutinized on harem visits allowed a narcissistic gratification
by “establishing their own priority in the harem.”56 Corrective attention to
women’s fantasy re-saturates the harem with sexuality, but it does not
reinscribe male heterosexuality as the definitional norm. Rather, it leads to
the complication of the nature of desire and object choice, foregrounding
the polymorphous perversity of female heterosexuality,57 male homoeroti-
cism,58 the lesbian gaze, and the articulation of nonnormative masculinities
and nonbinary gender identities.59 The harem, and the depiction of the
Orientalized woman, and man, emerge as sources of potential viewer/
reader pleasure far beyond the putative heterosexual male gaze.60
The reconceptualization of the complexities of sexualities and genders in
relation to the harem and its representation is informed by developments
in four related historiographical fields: an emphasis in studies of
176 reina lewis
imperialism on the multiplicity of and competition between different
forms of empire and imperialism; the shift in studies of modernity and
modernism toward understandings of multiple modernities and related
cultural forms;61 changes in studies of Orientalism that include attention to
the multiple Orientalisms and internal processes of regional
Orientalization that were themselves often integral to the staging of regio-
nal or “non-Western” modernities;62 and the challenge provided to the
history of sexuality’s initially Euro-American presumptions by recent
exploration of “non-Western” sexualities, most specifically those identify-
ing shifts in the sexual organization of Middle Eastern and Islamicate
societies as key to the modernization project.
As Najmabadi shows for nineteenth-century Iran, the shock of being
subjected to a Western imperial gaze that could not comprehend the
alternative genders and sexualities of Islamicate segregated society partly
determined the secularizing and Westernizing nature of processes of mod-
ernity.63 Also in the Ottoman empire over a longer period, as Ze’evi
discusses, self-image was tarnished by awareness of how the West viewed
the segregating world.64 In each case, modernization relied on and brought
about a shift from previous models of male homosociality and homoeroti-
cism into a characteristic male heterosociality and heteroeroticism in which
changes in the licit object of adult male desire (from the bearded youth to
the virginal girl) impacted on the lives of women as well as men.65
Attention to the history of different gender and sexuality histories, and
the constitutive nature of interaction between East and West, further
widens the frame of harem studies to include diverse forms of racialized
sexual and gender subjecthood and related pleasures in cultural consump-
tion then and now. This dovetails with forms of queer criticality that allow
for the investigation of queer – in its widest sense – pleasures in cultural
consumption without having to project anachronistic sexual identities
back onto cultural producers or their contemporaneous audiences.66
This brings to the fore subjects such as the eunuch and the harem guard,
not conventionally discussed as part of the sexualized vista of the harem,
foregrounding intersectional analyses of the sexualization of racial/ethnic
difference for diverse viewing subjects.67
Central to considerations of the multiple forms of pleasure made pos-
sible by representations of the harem is a refreshed understanding of the
complexity of power relations inside and in interaction with the sociality of
the harem. For Western women visitors, the contact zone of the harem was
a space of co-presence in which relations were determined by diverse forms
of local and international and transnational power. Research reveals the
The Harem: Gendering Orientalism 177
relative power of the Ottoman female elite in shaping the nature of the
Western women’s interaction – though the range of their influence might
be limited. The elite status of Ottoman princess Nazli Hanim gave her the
upper hand when negotiating the terms under which Elisabeth Jerichau-
Baumann could paint her portrait, but, once distant from the royal circuit
of power, the artist was free to paint unsanctioned portraits and exhibit
Nazli’s image in public.68

Technology and Representation

Arguing from a Saidian position that photography was central to
Orientalist knowledge production and instrumental in the creation of a
wider cross-class appetite for “images of the Orient,” Behdad emphasizes
that images of Oriental women (of all types) were the most frequent
topic.69 Mass dissemination of the photographic image “democratized”
the possibility of possessing the eroticized other,70 widening the appeal of
Orientalism. Though early approaches to Orientalism and photography,
such as Alloula’s, may have disproportionately drawn attention to porno-
graphic renditions of Oriental women,71 it is clear that images of Oriental
women found a lucrative market (though it was more often Jewish or
Armenian women posing as Muslim harem inmates than Muslim
Ottomans themselves). Photographs played a key role in the genre of
harem literature. Grace Ellison, writing initially for publication in the
British newspaper the Daily Telegraph, knew that she had to include
photographs but found her shot of a harem interior rejected because its
inclusion of European furniture challenged the imperialist nostalgia72 of
Western readers.73
The Ottomans took up photographic technologies with alacrity, as private
individuals74 and as a part of state power and surveillance. As Çelik demon-
strates, the use of photography was part and parcel of the development of
Ottoman modernity. Often operationalizing presentations of “modern”
forms of gender for men as well as women, photographs were created for
the internal communication of preferred versions of progress and for deploy-
ment abroad to influence the attitudes of Western powers.75 Photography
also figured in Ottoman Orientalism, such as the folkloric costume album
produced by Osman Hamdi with Marie de Launay for the 1873 Vienna
Universal Exposition, which presented rural, peasant, regional and minority
populations though a lens of nostalgic alterity. Cautioning that dispropor-
tionate focus on the albums misrepresents the vastness of the photographic
record, Çelik and Eldem contend that new methodologies are needed
178 reina lewis
alongside new critical approaches to the diversity of forms of production,
dissemination and consumption.76 For studies concerned with women’s
accounts of the harem and gender – a field initially characterized by a scarcity
of representations rather than a superfluity – the potential size of the
photographic record brings challenges and opportunities.
Central to the creation and dissemination of photographs of the Orient
were networks established between Western artists and writers and local
photographers such as Abdullah Frères and J. Pascal Sebah.77 These
relationships – enabling, exploitative, volatile and shifting – can be mir-
rored in the (at present still) less extensively documented links and net-
works between Ottoman women of all ethnicities and religions and
Western travelers and artists, in which images were acquired or commis-
sioned from local professional photographers and/or taken by women
themselves. New archive finds promise further insights into women’s use
of photography in self-fashioning and fantasy, such as Yasmin Taan’s
preliminary investigation of amateur photographer Marie el-Khazen’s
work in Lebanon in the 1920s and 1930s.78

The Political Mobilization of the Female Body Veiled

and Unveiled
For studies of gender and Orientalism now, the reactivation of religion as a
sign of civilization divide has brought new urgency to the historicized study
of the harem and veiling. While making the historical case for the changing
significance and mutable meanings of veiling is of value in itself, it also has
a political purpose in the face of the widespread resignification of veiling as
an exclusively Muslim practice. Several decades after the start of the mid-
twentieth-century global Islamic revival, Muslim women around the world
challenge attempts to naturalize the veil, notably the headscarf or hijab, as
the litmus test of female Muslim piety.79 This applies equally to the
many Muslim women who have chosen to wear the headscarf in
Muslim-minority countries; as Leila Ahmed has demonstrated for a
younger generation of Muslim women raised in the USA, religious
rights – to veil or not veil – are championed as universal human rights.80
If modest dress for women in early piety movements was often anti-
commercial and anti-fashion, different now is the expansion of a commer-
cial market for Muslim modest fashion.81 Initially online and niche, led by
women creative entrepreneurs and accompanied by a lively Muslim mod-
est fashion blogosphere expanding to all social media platforms, the
Muslim spend is now being promoted as of interest to global brands
The Harem: Gendering Orientalism 179
seeking to reach a youthful and growing populations.82 Whilst the enthu-
siasm for modest fashion and the valorization of choice is to some extent an
“embrace of neoliberalism,”83 the affordances of online and digital media
have created new opportunities for women to intervene in stereotypes
about Muslim female life. Demonstrating intra- and interfaith connectiv-
ity and contestation that parallels the cross-cultural characteristics of harem
literature, Muslim and modest fashion commentary goes far beyond the
narrow confines usually attributed to fashion-speak, requiring scholars to
think past the (now widely discredited) secularization thesis and take
seriously the social and personal role of religion84 and ethno-religious
cultures and the interaction with the market. In the face of Orientalist
presumption that veiling is always and only a sign of patriarchal oppres-
sion, women participating in and commentating on forms of Muslim
modest fashion – including those who do not cover – have created new
forms of community on- and offline, premised on an ideal of inclusivity
and respect for women’s different choices. The creative entrepreneurs and
fashion mediators who create images of Muslim women on- and offline
must, like their predecessors in harem literature and visual culture, navigate
the opportunities and constraints of an Orientalist market.

Notes
1. Whilst many of the key points about segregated life apply to other territories,
most of my examples in this chapter are related to the Ottoman empire and the
ethnically diverse population that made up the population of its dominions.
2. In this chapter, I use the terms “veil” and “veiling” generically to refer to the
many different garments that have been, and are, used to achieve forms of
Muslim and modest dressing. For further discussion, and for a consideration of
how popular non-Muslim understandings of the “veil” shift between head and
face covering, see Reina Lewis, Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
3. Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation
(London: Routledge, 1996).
4. On the impact of women’s absence from Said’s conceptualization of
Orientalism, see Jane Miller, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture
(London: Virago, 1990).
5. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994).
6. See Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso 1998).
7. Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman
Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
8. Leslie P. Peirce, “Writing Histories of Sexuality in the Middle East,” American
Historical Review 114:5 (December 2009): pp. 1325–1339, p. 1334.
180 reina lewis
9. Jateen Lad, “Panoptic Bodies: Black Eunuchs as Guardians of the
Topkapi Harem,” in Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living
Spaces, ed. Marilyn Booth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), pp. 136–176.
10. See, for example, Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York:
Random House, 1981); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism
and History (London: Verso, 1992); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education
of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
11. Montagu’s account of her visit to the Ottoman Empire in 1717 was circulated
privately on her return and published – to immediate public success – in
several editions from 1763. See Teresa Heffernan, Veiled Figures: Women,
Modernity, and the Spectres of Orientalism (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2016).
12. Marshall Hodgson coined the term “Islamicate” for use in relation to cultural
and social phenomena that “would refer not directly to the religion, Islam,
itself, but to social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and
the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among
non-Muslims.” Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and
History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1974), 3: p. 59.
13. See also, on India and Britain, Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation,
Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Leicester: Leicester University
Press, 1996).
14. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 66–111.
15. Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and
Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 6,; original
emphasis.
16. Heffernan, Veiled Figures, p. 10.
17. Sara Mills, Discourse of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and
Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991).
18. Meyda Yeðenoðlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of
Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
19. See, for example, Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western
Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992).
20. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London: Routledge, 1992).
21. Aimillia Mohd Ramli, “Contemporary Criticism on the Representation of
Female Travellers of the Ottoman Harem in the 19th Century: A Review,”
Intellectual Discourse 19 (2011): 263–279; Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem
Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination,” A Journal of
Women’s Studies 32:2 (2011): pp. 31–63.
The Harem: Gendering Orientalism 181
22. Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, “Feminism, the Taliban, and
Politics of Counter-Insurgency,” Anthropological Quarterly 75:2 (Spring
2002): pp. 339–354.
23. Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, eds., Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on
“The Well of Loneliness” (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
24. See, for example, Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, eds., Women in Middle
Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991).
25. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male–Female Dynamics in Muslim Society,
2nd ed. (London: Saqi Books, 1985).
26. Anna J. Secor, “The Veil and Urban Space in Istanbul: Women’s Dress,
Mobility and Islamic Knowledge,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of
Feminist Geography 9:1 (2002): pp. 5–22, p. 8.
27. Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women. The Portrayal of Women in
Photography of the Middle East 1860–1950 (London: Quartet, 1988); Jennifer
Heath, ed., The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
28. See, for example, Winifred Woodhull, “Unveiling Algeria,” Genders 10
(Spring 1991): pp. 112–131.
29. Said, Orientalism, p. 24.
30. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the
Imperial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995).
31. John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995).
32. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and
Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
33. Sophie Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo (London:
Charles Knight and Co., 1844), in Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle
Eastern and Western Women’s Writings: A Critical Sourcebook, eds. Reina Lewis
and Nancy Micklewright (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 79.
34. Emmeline Lott, The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and
Constantinople, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1866).
35. See C. Goffman, “Introduction,” in Behind Turkish Lattices: The Story of a
Turkish Woman’s Life, ed. H. Donaldson Jenkins (1911, Piscataway, NJ:
Gorgias Press, 2005), pp. v–xxix. Missionaries rarely managed to convert
Muslims, succeeding mainly in converting other types of Christians.
36. Annie Jane Tennant Harvey, Turkish Harems and Circassian Homes (London:
Hurst and Blackett, 1871), p. 8.
37. Musbah Haidar, Arabesque (London: Hutchinson, 1944).
38. Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–
1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992).
39. Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the
Structure of Jane Eyre,” Signs 18:3 (Spring 1993): pp. 592–617.
40. It was common in this period for elite women to become literate in the
“accomplishment” languages of Europe rather than in Arabic or Osmanli,
182 reina lewis
since these were forms of literacy associated with clerical and legal roles,
neither of which were open formally to women.
41. Melek-Hanoum, Thirty Years in the Harem: or the Autobiography of Melek-
Hanoum, Wife of H. H. Kibrizli-Mehemet-Pasha (London: Chapman and
Hall, 1872).
42. Emily Said-Ruete, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess: Princess Salme bin Said ibn
Sultan al-Bu Saidi of Oman and Zanzibar (London: Ward and Downey, 1888).
43. Halidé Adivar Edib, Memoirs of Halidé Edib (Piscataway, NJ: Giorgias Books,
2005 [1926]); The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halidé Edib
(London: John Murray, 1928).
44. Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and
Fertility, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
45. Margot Badran, Feminism, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of
Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
46. Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society and the Press
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes
Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001).
47. Beth Baron, “Liberated Bodies and Saved Soul: Freed African Slave Girls and
Missionaries in Egypt,” in African Communities in Asia and the
Mediterranean: Between Integration and Conﬂict, ed. E. R. Toledano
(Halle: Max Plank Institute and Africa World Press, 2011).
48. Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, ed. Grace Ellison
(Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Books, 2004 [1913]); Melek Hanoum and G.
Ellison, Abdul Hamid’s Daughter: The Tragedy of an Ottoman Princess
(London: Methuen, 1913).
49. See, for example, Zeynep Inankur, “Mary Adelaide Walker,” in The Poetics
and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism, eds. Zeynep
Inankur, Reina Lewis and Mary Roberts (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2011); M. Roberts, Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and
Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2015).
50. Fatima Mernissi, The Harem Within (New York: Doubleday, 1994).
51. Grace Ellison, An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem (Piscataway, NJ:
Giorgias Books, 2007 [1915]), p. 17.
52. Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households.
53. Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art
and Travel Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 65.
54. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America (May 1983): pp. 118–
131, pp. 187–191.
55. See my discussion of Emmeline Lott in Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism:
Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).
56. Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, p. 91.
57. Joan DelPlato, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem
1800–1875 (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses: 2002).
The Harem: Gendering Orientalism 183
58. Joseph A. Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014).
59. See, for example, essays in Joan DelPlato and Julie F. Codell, eds.,
Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality in Global Cultures (London:
Routledge, 2016).
60. On women patrons of Ingres’ odalisques, see Carol Ockman, Ingres’ Eroticised
Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1995).
61. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129:1 (Winter
2000): pp. 1–29.
62. Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review
107:3 (June 2002): pp. 768–796.
63. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender
and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005).
64. Often accessed by reading Western travel writing: Dror Ze’evi, Producing
Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
65. Najmabadi considers that male heterosociality retains versions of homosoci-
ality only by disavowing homoeroticism, screening same-sex behaviors as
sexually innocent.
66. James Smalls, “Public Face, Private Thoughts: Fetish, Interracialism, and the
Homoerotic in Carl van Vechten’s Photographs,” in The Passionate Camera:
Photography and Bodies of Desire, ed. D. Bright (London: Routledge, 1998) pp.
78–102.
67. James Smalls, “Menace at the Portal: Masculine Desire and the Homoerotics
of Orientalism,” in DelPlato and Codell, Orientalism, Eroticism, pp. 25–54.
68. Roberts, Intimate Outsiders.
69. Ali Behdad, “The Orientalist Photograph,” in Photography’s
Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, eds. Ali Behdad
and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), p. 18.
For an alternative argument that the interactivity of photographing
human subjects contains within it the possibility of disrupting the
panoptic imperial gaze, see Christopher Pinney, “What’s Photography
Got To Do with It?,” in Behdad and Gartlan, Photography’s
Orientalism, pp. 33–52.
70. Behdad, “The Orientalist Photograph,” p. 28.
71. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1987). For a critique, see Nancy Micklewright, A Victorian Traveller
in the Middle East: The Photography and Travel Writing of Annie Lady Brassey
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
72. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (London:
Routledge, 1993).
73. The photograph was later repurposed in Zeyneb Hanoum’s book A Turkish
Woman’s European Impressions, appearing with Ellison’s editorial caption
184 reina lewis
under the title A Corner of a Turkish Harem of Today, Zeyneb Hanoum, 1913,
p. 192.
74. See Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright, “Viewing Each Other: Visual
Dialogues,” in Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western
Women’s Writings: A Critical Sourcebook, eds. Reina Lewis and Nancy
Micklewright (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 31–63.
75. Zeynep Çelik, “Photographing Mundane Modernity,” in Camera Ottomana:
Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire 1840–1914, eds. Zeynep
Çelik and Edhem Eldem (Istanbul: Koç University Publications, 2015).
76. See Çelik and Eldem, Camera Ottomana, Introduction. See also
Micklewright, “Orientalism and Photography,” in The Poetics and Politics of
Place, ed. Inankur et al., chapter 6.
77. Behdad, “The Orientalist Photograph”; Roberts, Intimate Outsiders and
Istanbul Exchanges.
78. Yasmine Nachabe (Taan), “An Alternative Representation of Femininity in
1920s Lebanon: Through the Mise-en-abîme of a Masculine Space,” New
Middle Eastern Studies 1 (2011), www.brismes.ac.uk/nmes/wp-content/uploa
ds/2011/06/NMES2011QSNachabe.pdf (accessed February 24, 2017).
79. Asra Q. Nomani and Hala Arafa, “As Muslim Women, We Actually Ask You
Not To Wear the Hijab in the Name of Interfaith Solidarity,” Washington Post,
December 21, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/12/
21/as-muslim-women-we-actually-ask-you-not-to-wear-the-hijab-in-the-name-
of-interfaith-solidarity/ (accessed April 5, 2016).
80. Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to
America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
81. Reina Lewis, Muslim Fashion; Emma Tarlo, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics,
Faith (Oxford: Berg, 2010).
82. See Aliakbar Jafari and Özlem Sandikci, eds., Islam, Marketing and
Consumption (London: Routledge, 2016).
83. Heffernan, Veiled Figures, p. 139. See also Annelies Moors and Emma Tarlo,
eds., Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and
America (Oxford: Berg, 2013).
84. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
chapter 10

Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing

Ali Behdad

In his posthumous satirical Dictionnaire des idées reçues, Gustave Flaubert

(1821–1880) defined an Orientalist as “a man who has traveled a lot.”1
Flaubert may have been lampooning the cliché figure of the Orientalist,
but his mocking characterization aptly captures the intimate relation
between Orientalism and Middle East travel writing. Indeed, at the origin
of Orientalism are the numerous travelogues by European travelers to the
Middle East. Although Europe’s geopolitical interest in the Middle East
dates back at least to the days of crusades in the eleventh century, starting in
the late seventeenth century European travelers to the Middle East pro-
duced a substantial body of literature about the region, describing its
geography, people, languages and cultures, which facilitated the rise of
modern Orientalism both as an academic discipline and as a discourse of
power. Indeed, modern Orientalism would have not been possible without
travel literature, for, to understand and write about the Orient, Europeans
had to first explore the region as travelers. In turn, by the 1870s when
Flaubert wrote his encyclopedic entry, Orientalist discourse informed
every account of Middle Eastern societies, as nineteenth-century travelers
relied on the works of their precursors and professional Orientalists to
represent the so-called Orient. As such, Orientalism and Middle Eastern
travel writing maintained a symbiotic relationship that made the region
epistemologically visible and exotic. In what follows, I elaborate the dis-
cursive and political implications of this relationship by considering how
European travelogues constructed the Middle East as a site of exoticism
and thus participated in the production of Euro-imperialist subjectivity. I
will first offer a discussion of Orientalism as a discourse of power and then
consider several representative examples of travel writing from the late
seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries to elaborate the rheto-
rical and narrative techniques they employ in representing the Orient as
well as discursive shifts that occurred during this period.
In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said mapped the political
implications of Europe’s exoticist fascination with the Middle East (or

185
186 ali behdad
“the Orient”). He used the notion of “Orientalism” to mean three things:
(i) the work of anyone who teaches and writes about the Middle East; (ii) a
“style of thought” marked by a hierarchical relation between the Occident
and the Orient; and (iii) “the corporate institution for dealing with the
Orient.”2 While the second definition is general enough to accommodate a
whole range of writers from Aeschylus and Dante to Victor Hugo and Sir
Richard Burton, the first and third definitions more particularly address
the rise of modern Orientalist discourse since the late eighteenth century in
Europe, a discourse that was more specifically tied to Europe’s colonial
interests and history in the Middle East. Drawing on both Michel
Foucault’s critique of pure knowledge and the interdependence of
power/knowledge as well as Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony,
Said demonstrated for the first time that Orientalist representations of
the Middle East were not objective or disinterested representations of the
region; rather, they were the backbone of a relationship of power, of the
West’s colonial domination over the Middle East. Orientalism, in other
words, is both “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic,
scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts” and
“a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control,
manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different . . .
world.”3 Mining a complex and plural field of discursive practices in
Western modern culture, he argued that the Orient was thus an integral
part of Europe’s material civilization and cultural self-fashioning.
Although Said’s study often presents a monolithic view of Orientalism, a
purely ideological and coherent discourse of power that leaves little room
for the possibility of difference among various modes of Orientalist repre-
sentation, it has nonetheless provided readers with an important theore-
tical framework to study European travel writing by shifting the focus from
textuality to historicity and from the aesthetic to the political.4 Indeed,
Orientalism, if viewed as a complex and heterogeneous network of repre-
sentations that transformed over time, is indispensable to the understand-
ing of Middle Eastern travel writing. Whether considered in the context of
their production or their reception, European travelogues to the region can
be meaningfully studied only if they are considered in terms of geopolitical
distinctions, cultural assumptions and economic as well as political inter-
ests about the Middle East. In insisting that Orientalism offers a crucial
perspective from which to comprehend these works and their cultural
significance, I do not mean to suggest that European travel narratives of
the Middle East should be viewed merely as a reflection of Europeans’
racial prejudice or that they simply validated Euro-imperial dominance
Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing 187
over the region. Rather, while considering the ways in which European
representations of the Oriental other are implicated in relations of power, it
is crucial to attend to their discursive heterogeneity and historical specifi-
cities. Orientalist discourse depends on a principle of discontinuity that
makes possible the production of a whole series of representations in
different historical periods. Therefore, European travel writing constitutes
not a monolithic discourse but a complex web of representations marked
by difference, ambivalence and heterogeneity. Let us consider some exam-
ples of European travelogues from different historical periods to explore
their relationships with Orientalism.
Although Orientalism achieved its cultural hegemony in the nineteenth
century, travel narratives of the Middle East date back much earlier. In the
seventeenth century, for example, the British traveler Thomas Coryat
(1577–1617) traveled to Turkey, Persia and India and published his highly
popular Greetings from the Court of the Great Mogul in 1616. More sig-
nificantly, in late seventeenth-century France, the genre of Middle East
travel writing became extremely popular with the rise of mercantilism and
the expansionist policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance
minister. During the second half of the seventeenth century, the building
of the French mercantile fleet, the establishing of overseas trading compa-
nies, especially Compagnie du Levant in 1670, and the broad financing for
foreign travel all enabled the conditions and interests for exploration of the
Middle East, which in turn served France’s new economic interests in the
region. As Pierre Martino has remarked, “[T]he [Orientalist] movement
becomes more carefully thought through and persistent with Colbert: as
much as he encouraged the efforts of travelers in the Muslim Orient, he
also created and backed large commercial enterprises.”5 Colbert also helped
the founding of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, a major
contributor to the study of the Middle East, and created chairs of Oriental
languages in the Collège de France. Moreover, he encouraged and finan-
cially supported many French travelers, such as Jean Chardin (1643–1713),
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–1689) and Jean de Thévenot (1633–1667), to
travel and write travelogues to inform the public and government officials
about the region, its cultures and its people. Travel literature, firmly
molded into the structure of colonial expansion, thus became a dominant
literary genre in France as well as England in the second half of the
seventeenth century. To give an idea of the growth of interest in this
genre, suffice it to say that in the eighty years between 1665 and 1745, at
least one hundred and fifty travelogues appeared in France, a substantial
percentage of all books published during the period. While the prosperous
188 ali behdad
economic system of mercantilism provided travelers, missionaries and
ambassadors with the financial support to embark on their logistically
challenging journeys to the Middle East and elsewhere, the discursive
practices of travelers in turn created a rich body of knowledge through
which the emerging European colonial powers such as France considered
their political and economic relations with the region. There was, in other
words, a circular relation between politico-economic interests and travel
writing.
A representative example of the articulation of the historical urge to
travel abroad appears in Thévenot’s 1664 Voyage du Levant:
The desire to travel has always been quite natural among men; [but] it seems
to me that this passion has never incited them so strongly as it has in our
days. The great number of travelers who cross paths in all parts of the world
sufficiently supports this hypothesis, and the volume of travelogues that
have appeared over the past twenty years leaves no doubt about it: there is no
one who is drawn to beautiful things, who is touched by what he learns from
them, and very few who, if they were not held back by pressing attachments
at home, would not want to witness and observe such things themselves. It is
these beautiful narratives that made me first think about traveling, and since
in the years 1652, I did not have any considerable business that prevented me
from leaving, I decided to satisfy my curiosity by following the movements
that these travelogues had inspired me to undertake.6
Although Thévenot describes the desire to travel as a natural phenomenon,
he is quick to acknowledge that what motivated him to embark on his
journey were other travelogues. His recognition of the mediated nature of
his passion or curiosity to see other worlds points to the power of the inter-
text that informs and enables every traveler’s desire for the Oriental
journey. Thévenot’s remarks thus speak to the emergence of a discourse
of otherness that was productive of the desire for adventure.
What is notable about Thévenot’s introductory remark is also the way
he describes his desire for travel to the Orient as a curiosité, which signifies a
lack of serious or scientific interest in exploration. Unlike later travelers of
the eighteenth century, Thévenot displays no professional affiliation or
institutional commitment in making the journey East. What characterizes
seventeenth-century representations of the Orient is an exoticist mode of
travel that is less interested in providing any scientific observation or
pedagogical material than seeing “marvelous” and “strange” lands. As the
frequent appearance of words such as le merveilleux, l’inconnu and la
curiosité in the travelogues of Thévenot and his contemporaries suggests,
seventeenth-century Orientalism was mostly amateur and had not yet
Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing 189
become the professionalized and systematic discourse that it became in the
early decades of the nineteenth century.
To underscore the nonscientific or nonprofessional tendencies of such
travel narratives, however, does not suggest an absence of an ideological
discourse of otherness in the seventeenth century. Quite the contrary, the
seemingly innocent or personal desire to explore non-Western societies was
implicated in an ideology of difference that assumed the superiority of the
West and the inferiority of the Orient. Consider the following statement in
the beginning of another seventeenth-century travelogue, Tavernier’s Les
six voyages en Turquie & en Perse:
One cannot travel in Asia as one would in Europe; trips are not undertaken
at all hours of the day nor with the same ease. One does not find transporta-
tion going every week from one city or province to another, and the
countries are markedly different. In Asia, one sees regions that are entirely
uncultivated and uninhabited; or one finds men who, either because of the
harshness of the climate and the terrain, or because of laziness, prefer to live
in poverty rather than work. There are vast deserts to be traversed, passage
across which is dangerous because of lack of water and the crossings of
Arabs. In Asia, one does not find inns that are orderly and well-run, or hosts
who care to take travelers in and treat them well.7
Tavernier begins his observation with the idea of essential ontological and
epistemological differences between the Occident and the Orient. The
geography and the people of the Orient, according to him, are the exact
opposite of those in Europe: the towns are uncultivated, depopulated and
deserted; the landscape is arid, desolate and dangerous; and the people are
inhospitable, lazy and violent. Such misrepresentations of the otherwise
prosperous Ottoman and Safavid empires speaks to an ideological form of
exoticism that characterized Europe’s encounter with its Oriental other
from the very beginning. Although seventeenth-century Orientalism had
not yet achieved the status of scientific discourse, it nonetheless displayed
the same kind of binary logic that located the Westerner in a position of
cultural and political superiority. As a result, seventeenth-century
Orientalist travelogues were no less implicated in a colonialist will to
dominate the Orient. Consider the following dedicatory note to Louis
XIV in Tavernier’s 1675 Nouvelle relation de l’intérieur du sérail, the
imaginary account of his journey to the interior space of Ottoman
Sultan’s harem: “It seems to me that all the kings of Asia and Africa are
made for the sole purpose of one day becoming your tributaries, and that
you are destined to rule the entire world.”8 This bluntly imperialist state-
ment in the beginning of a text ostensibly about the erotic world of the
190 ali behdad
harem speaks to the intertwined relationship between travel writing and
imperialism in the seventeenth century. It is not surprising that the rise of
Orientalist travelogues in France coincided with the expansionist policies
of Colbert, for there was a circulatory system of exchange between aesthetic
and discursive representations of the Orient and the political and economic
interests of mercantilism in seventeenth-century France.
Although Orientalism as a modern discourse of power emerged in the
second half of the seventeenth century, it was not until the end of
the eighteenth century that systematic and “scientific” investigations of
the Middle East appeared. Until then, as I have suggested, Orientalism and
travelogues of the Orient were largely amateur endeavors that engaged in a
discourse of exoticism. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, however,
an explosion of interest in the Orient occurred among European politi-
cians, philologists, historians and philosophers who viewed the region
more professionally as a place for serious scholarly exploration and obser-
vation. A significant factor in the rise of a systematic and professional form
of Orientalism was the influence of travel literature, which, as Said points
out, “brought the Orient into sharper and more extended focus.”9 What
distinguished late eighteenth-century travel writing from its seventeenth-
century predecessor, and what made it particularly significant with regards
to the rise of modern Orientalism, was a shift from the exoticism of
adventure to the science of adventure. An adequate discussion of the forces
that enabled this shift is beyond the scope of this chapter, but two major
factors that helped produce this discursive shift are worth mentioning in
passing. First, there was the rise of positivism and empiricism which
Johannes Fabian, in his seminal Time and the Other, and Mary Louise
Pratt, in her path-breaking book Imperial Eyes, have convincingly mapped
in the context of travel literature. Late eighteenth-century travel literature
was informed by what Pratt calls a “planetary consciousness” – that is, an
epistemological vision “marked by an orientation toward interior explora-
tion and the construction of a global-scale meaning through the descriptive
apparatuses of natural history.”10 Dating back to Charles de la Condamine’
scientific journey of 1735 to South America and Carl Linnaeus’s 1735
Systema naturae, planetary consciousness offered travelers to the Middle
East a classificatory system useful not only in observing and cataloguing
what they saw but also in creating a narrative of their experiences of other
places in evolutionary terms. Second, the declining power of the Ottoman
Empire and the collapse of Safavid dynasty in Persia in 1736 created the
political vacuum the European domination of the Middle East subse-
quently filled. European powers no longer felt either threatened or
Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing 191
competitive with imperial states in the region and were thus able to pursue
their own expansionist policies there. It is perhaps for these reasons that
Egypt, Palestine, Arabia and Syria became the new sites for Europe’s
imperialist ventures.
To elaborate some of the specific discursive characteristics and political
implications of the shift from the exoticism to science in Orientalist
travel literature, let us consider two exemplary travelogues from the
period: Claude-Étienne Savary’s Lettres sur l’Égypte (1785–1786) and
Constantin-François Volney’s Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1783). Unlike
their seventeenth-century precursors who were directly supported by gov-
ernmental agencies, Volney (1757–1820) and Savary (1750–1788) volunta-
rily embarked on the Oriental journey, and they viewed their journeys as
self-educating enterprises. The secular idea of traveling, which character-
ized their mode of travel, constituted a discursive transformation that
necessitated new relations with the Orient and new strategies of observa-
tion and representation. The late eighteenth-century traveler felt com-
pelled, for the first time, to contemplate the value of his journey,
rationalize his discursive practice, formulate new relations with the
Oriental other, engage in an empirical mode of observation and classify
in a positivist fashion what he observed. As well, he viewed his journey as a
serious educational experience to learn and produce an account of his
journey that would contribute to Europe’s understanding of non-
Western worlds.
Both travelers, for example, begin their narratives by pointing out the
educational benefits of seeing foreign lands and the intellectual values of
exploring other cultures. Savary, for example, remarks:
Traveling is Man’s most instructive school. It is by travelling that he is able
to know his fellow men; it is by living with other peoples, by studying their
customs, their religion, their government, that he has a standard of compar-
ison by which he can judge the customs, religion, and government of his
country.11
Savary views his journey as a mode of self-realization and appreciates its
pedagogical value. For the late eighteenth-century traveler, the Oriental
journey is not a search for the exotic or the eroticized other but an
instructive activity that not only completes his formal education but also
benefits the general public by raising awareness about one’s own religion,
government, and moral and cultural values. The Orient still remains
Europe’s other, but otherness becomes an object of interest as a serious
subject of study and exploration. Volney too speaks about his “taste” and
192 ali behdad
“passion for learning” and explains that he decided to embark on his
journey to Syria and Egypt because they “seemed to me appropriate
grounds for making the political and moral observation to which I wanted
to devote myself.”12 The eighteenth-century traveler learns about other
cultures, religions and political systems, and the knowledge he gains
provides him with an opportunity for comparison. The more he learns
about other cultures, the better he understands and appreciates his own
culture, religion and government. “Comparatism in the study of the
Orient and Orientals,” as Said explains, is “synonymous with the apparent
ontological inequality of Occident and Orient.”13 The late eighteenth-
century traveler presents himself as the powerful subject of knowledge, a
savant, invested with the discursive authority to represent the other; he
knows, and has the necessary credentials to judge and make authoritative
statements about, other cultures.
It is for this reason that both Voleny and Savary take pains in their
introductory remarks to highlight their credentials. Whether presented as a
piece of autobiographical information – as in the case of Volney, whose
education and acquired passion for learning have prepared him for the
journey – or given as a piece of advice – as in Savary’s case – the traveler
emphasizes his educational preparation for such an undertaking, which
gives him the authority to observe and represent the Orient. Savary, for
example, points out that “it is important” that travelers “have an extensive
knowledge of geography and history [of the region]. The first will situate
the place which served as a theatre for great events. The latter will retrace
those events in the memory.”14 It is significant that Savary considered
history and geography as the two crucial fields of study necessary for
traveling in the Middle East, for Orientalism as a discourse of power
required a geopolitical awareness and a historical understanding to com-
paratively locate the history and culture of the Oriental other within the
privileged Western savoir. Knowledge of geography and history provided
the traveler-savant with useful tools to make an accurate assessment of what
he observed, enabling him to locate the Orient and its people in spatial and
temporal terms.
Moreover, the traveler must have some knowledge of Oriental languages
to be able to communicate with local people and to effectively observe
other cultures. This is the indispensable criterion that Volney claims most
of his earlier predecessors woefully lacked. He points out that, by “hastily
traversing the country . . . [w]ithout language, we would not know how to
appreciate the essence of a nation’s character.”15 Volney’s statement speaks
to how the new discipline of philology helped professionalize both travel to
Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing 193
the Orient and Orientalism itself, making them both more systematic and
scientific. Volney’s remarks also point to an ethnological interest in the
Orient, one that goes beyond the archaeological interest in Egyptian
antiquity and the superficial observation of earlier travelers. Unlike the
cursory and one-dimensional views of Egyptologists and earlier
Orientalists, the late eighteenth-century traveler is interested in the mod-
ern culture of the Orient. He resides for a longer period, and his knowledge
of Oriental languages allows him to interact with the local people more
directly, and he is thus able to understand and penetrate the essence of the
Orient.
Not surprisingly, the longer sojourn and the knowledge of Oriental
languages are not meant to bring the European traveler any closer to the
Orient or make him form a more intimate relation to the object of his
study. On the contrary, what is emphasized in the new approach to the
study of the Oriental other is distance. Both Savary and Volney underscore
the importance of professional aloofness from their objects of study. Savary
speaks of the need to approach the Orient without “any emotion” and “to
not place oneself in front of what is depicted” in order to give weight to
what the traveler ultimately exposes about the other.16 Similarly, Volney
cautions the traveler against the initial sense of wonderment and shock,
encouraging a more distant and dispassionate relation to the Oriental
other. He argues: “One must wait for this initial shock to subside and
repeat the observation more than once, in order to be assured of its
accuracy.”17 The Orientalist, as Said points out, “is a watcher, never
involved, always detached.”18 Distance here means impartiality: to be an
objective judge of cultural difference, the traveler must stand apart from his
object of study.
The late eighteenth-century traveler’s claim to absolute truthfulness and
total objectivity points to a discursive strategy by means of which ordinary
and personal observation gains the status of science. Travelogues of the late
eighteenth century are therefore peppered with statements that anxiously
insist on objectivity and truthfulness. Savary, for instance, insists that a
traveler must “rise above partiality and opinion” and that “in describing
cities and countries, his brushstrokes [should] be guided by the hand of
truth.”19 Similarly, Volney speaks of his “impartial love of truth” and
claims that “I forbade myself any imaginary depiction.”20 What these
travelers’ tenacious claims of objectivity and truthfulness point to is not
merely a love for factual depiction but rather the authorization of what is
ultimately a personal narrative as a scientific discourse. Savary’s and
Voleny’s insistence on complete objectivity, in other words, is in essence
194 ali behdad
a rhetorical move to conceal their opinionated presence, to camouflage
their sense of European superiority and to diffuse their authoritative voices
in order to claim the role of a savant or a scientist. More importantly, the
notion of observational distance and emotional detachment posits a binary
and hierarchical relation between the Western traveler and the Oriental
other, one in which the European is always the subject of knowledge and
power and the Oriental other is consistently the object of epistemological
investigation. That the traveler is always the inquiring and observing
subject positions the Oriental as an inferior other in need of examination,
correction and ultimately colonization.
Savary’s and Voleny’s discursive practices mark a new development in
travel literature, namely its crossing of what Michel Foucault calls the
“threshold of scientificity.”21 Their discussions of the necessary credentials
of an effective traveler, their claims of objectivity and truthfulness, and
their classificatory representations of the Orient speak to a shift toward a
systematic and scientific phase of travel literature, one that would achieve
its full development in the nineteenth century when Orientalists such as
the Anglo-Swiss Jean Louis Burckhardt (1784–1817), Baron Silvestre de
Sacy (1758–1838) and Ernest Renan (1823–1892) in France were able “to
solidify the official discourse of Orientalism, to systematize its insights, and
to establish its intellectual and worldly institutions,” as Said has convin-
cingly argued.22 The travelogues of the late eighteenth century introduced
a number of formal criteria for travel to the Orient, defined certain rules for
an effective approach to represent it and proposed new strategies of cultural
encounter that had transformational effects for the emerging discourse of
modern Orientalism. The systematic ways of representing Orientals and
the scientific methods of observation are precisely what gave Orientalism
its status as an authoritative body of knowledge about the Orient.
To underscore the shift in the discourse of travel from exoticism to
scientificity is not to claim that other forms of travel writing became
obsolete or that exoticism as a mode of representing the Middle East
became outmoded. Rather, as Foucault explains, such discursive shifts
mean that “a general transformation of relations has occurred.” Indeed,
new discursive formations always entail a great deal of “continuity, return,
and repetition” in relation to their precursors.23 In the nineteenth century,
there is a proliferation of travel writing of every sort, as technological
advances in transportation and political changes in Europe and the
Middle East ushered in a new era of mass travel to the Middle East and
elsewhere. Not only did the development of steamships and the construc-
tion of railroad lines between various cities in the Middle East
Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing 195
revolutionize travel in the region, but the increasing presence of European
colonial powers in the Orient provided the necessary logistical support and
security for European travelers. Moreover, the French conquest of Algeria
in 1830 and France’s subsequent occupation of the broader Maghreb, the
ending of the Greco-Turkish conflicts in 1828, and the British presence in
Egypt and India “stabilized” the sociopolitical situation in the Middle East,
providing travelers with the extra security to travel there. The improved
traveling conditions and the presence of Europeans throughout the Middle
East made the Oriental journey, once an arduous, demanding and ambi-
tious endeavor, an easier, less time-consuming and more practical enter-
prise, thus generating a steady flow of European travelers to the Orient.
With the increase in the number of travelers, we witness the multiplica-
tions of the genre of travel writing since the mid-nineteenth century. Let us
consider three types of journey to the Orient by way of elaborating the
interdependence of Orientalism and travel writing.
Above all, there was the heroic and adventurous traveler who wished to
provide Orientalism with new information and knowledge about the less
accessible regions of the Middle East. Sir Richard Burton’s (1821–1890)
Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah (1857) and
Charles Doughty’s (1843–1926) Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) are two
representative examples of this mode of travel. In the beginning of their
narratives, these travelers make prefatory remarks that address and justify
the purpose of their travels, their qualifications as valiant travelers and their
institutional affiliations. Burton, for example, begins his travelogue by
introducing himself as an adventurous traveler whose “zeal for discovery”
has made him offer his services to the Royal Geographical Society of
London “for the purpose of removing . . . the huge white blot which in
our maps still notes the Eastern and the Central regions of Arabia.”24 He
goes on to list the principal objects of his journey, namely “to find out if
any market for horses could be opened between Central Arabia and
India . . . ; to obtain information concerning the Great Eastern wilderness,
the vast expanse marked Rub’a al-khálí (the ‘Empty Abode’) in our maps;
to inquire into the hydrography of the Hijaz . . . ; and finally, to try, by
actual observation, the truth of a theory proposed by Colonel W. Sykes,
namely, that if tradition be true, in the population of the vast Peninsula
there must exist certain physiological differences sufficient to warrant our
questioning the common origin of the Arab family.”25 Burton underscores
his institutional affiliation, which provides him with financial and logistical
support and the authority to speak as an expert. Far from being a personal
narrative as the title of his travelogue indicates, he embarks on his journey
196 ali behdad
as a representative of a major institution in order to contribute to several
bodies of knowledge, namely the economic, geographical, hydrographical
and ethnological fields. Burton also points to his philological training
and his “Arabic studies,” his commitment to a long sojourn in order to
penetrate and understand the “Moslem inner life in a really Mohammedan
country,” and the “dangerous” nature of his endeavor to highlight his
qualifications as a professional Orientalist and as a heroic adventurer
wishing “to set foot on that mysterious spot which no vacation tourist
has yet described, measured, sketched and photographed.”26 Burton’s
travel narrative speaks to the convergence of the autobiographical and
the professional, as personal observations of an eccentric adventurer yield
new knowledge useful to official Orientalism.
In the nineteenth century, we also witness the emergence of a Romantic
type of traveler who embarks on a journey to the Orient to satisfy his
nostalgic desire for a disappearing other. Unlike his heroic and professional
counterpart, the Romantic traveler neither views his journey as a daring
and adventurous endeavor nor wishes to engage in a scientific or systematic
exploration to produce new knowledge about the Orient. At a time when
the exotic Oriental had become a familiar figure of otherness, the
Romantic traveler could not help but experience a sense of belatedness
that produced either a sense of disorientation and loss or an obsessive urge
to experience the life of an authentic, albeit disappearing, other. Gérard de
Nerval’s (1808–1855) Voyage en Orient (1851) and Gustave Flaubert’s (1821–
1880) travel notes of his 1849–1850 visit to the Orient offer two examples of
this mode of travel. Unlike Burton, Doughty and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
(1840–1922), whose travelogues are marked by an egotistical will to dis-
cover, Nerval and Flaubert felt nostalgic about what they perceived to be a
disappearing other, a feeling that made their romantic representations of
the Orient ideologically ambivalent, vacillating between a repetition of
Orientalist clichés and a subtle resistance to European cultural hegemony.
Nerval, for example, describes his travelogue in a self-doubting manner as
“a fairly sad litany of misadventures” as well as “a rather weak description,”
a “painting without horizon,” and a tale full of “melancholic reveries.”27
Throughout his narrative, he yearns for a time when “real” adventures in
unknown lands were possible, when the exotic other had not become a
cultural platitude.
That the belated traveler views the Orient on the verge of disappearance,
however, does not prevent him from attempting to explore and represent
it. Consider the following exemplary passage in which Nerval critiques the
superficial tourist:
Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing 197
But Egypt, solemn and pious, is always the country of enigma and mysteries;
the beauty surrounds itself, as before, with veils and wrappings, and this
gloomy attitude easily discourages the frivolous European. He leaves Cairo
after eight days and rushes toward the waterfall of the Nile, searching for
other disappointments which science has in store for him, and which will
never be suitable to him. … Why go so fast? Let us stop and attempt to lift a
corner of the stern veil of the goddess of Saïs.28
Nerval’s representation of Egypt repeats the Orientalist cliché of the
country as an enigmatic and mysterious space while simultaneously con-
sidering it a beautiful and complex society that resists the gaze of European
travelers. Distinguishing himself from the superficial tourist who quickly
leaves the culturally rich city to see the pyramids, Nerval presents himself as
a serious and patient traveler who wishes to have a more “authentic”
experience of the Oriental life. The romantic traveler’s critique of super-
ficiality, thus, implicates him and his representation in official
Orientalism’s project to penetrate the Orient and to claim epistemological
mastery over it. In his “Journal de bord,” Nerval, like the authoritative
Volney, even goes so far as to claim that his fanciful representation is
nothing but “humble truth” without any “dramatic and novelistic
devices.”29 That Nerval’s attempt to go beyond the official Orientalism
ultimately fails suggests that there is no easy escape from the authority of
the dominant discourse.
In spite of his intertextual relation with earlier travelers, Nerval’s desire
for an immersive experience of the Orient still differs from that of his more
serious British counterparts. Nerval’s long stay in Cairo did not aim to
produce new knowledge about the city, as he copied verbatim texts from
Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians;
instead, he indulged in the pleasure principle associated with Oriental
culture. In Nerval’s travelogue, we witness the emergence of a hedonistic
tradition in Orientalism that viewed the Oriental journey as a leisurely
experience to step out of the familiar reality of Europe, a trip that would
ease the cultural ennui associated with the boredom of his daily modern
life. Romantic travelers like Nerval, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier (1811–
1872) and Pierre Loti (1850–1923) were motivated by a form of cultural
escapism that turned the occasionally serious Orientalist into a man of
pleasure, a sort of self-indulgent traveler less interested in reproducing
a copiously depicted Orient than in pursuing a nostalgic desire to experi-
ence the life of a disappearing other. In an exemplary moment in his
journey, Nerval writes: “I did not attempt to represent Constantinople;
its palaces, mosques, spas, and shores have already been described so many
198 ali behdad
times: I simply wanted to give an idea of a promenade through its streets
and squares at the time of major holidays [i.e. Ramadan].”30 The romantic
traveler is not in a hurry to accomplish anything; he is a self-indulgent and
hedonistic traveler satisfied with his personal experiences of an alien
culture.
Nerval’s derogatory reference to the frivolous traveler in his travelogue
speaks to the emergence of another type of travel in the nineteenth century,
namely tourism. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the improved travel
conditions and political changes in the Middle East democratized the
Oriental journey, allowing the bourgeois class to tour the region.
Accordingly, with the rise of tourism came a new mode of travel writing,
the guidebook. Orientalist tourist guides appeared almost simultaneously
in France and England in the mid-nineteenth century. In France,
Marchebeus’ 1839 Voyage from Paris to Constantinople by Steamship was
the first such volume. It was soon followed by Quetin’s more practical
Guide en Orient in 1846. In 1861, Adolphe Laurent Joanne published its first
handbook for Egypt with maps, providing detailed information about
accommodation and transportation and incorporating beautiful engrav-
ings that accompanied its descriptions of towns. In England, London
publisher John Murray, who had a monopoly on tourist guide production,
published Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey,
Asia Minor, and Constantinople in 1840. Murray subsequently produced
several focused tour guides for Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Palestine in the
1850s. Following in Murray’s footsteps, the German publisher Karl
Baedeker also began publishing new and improved tour guides for travelers
to the Middle East. Equipped with high-quality maps, texts by scholars and
Orientalists, and detailed descriptions of architecture and historical monu-
ments, Baedeker’s guides were extremely popular and were translated into
French and English.
Scholars have often overlooked the discursive formation of tourist
guides in the nineteenth century, viewing the genre of handbook as an
insignificant form of representation catering to bourgeois consumerism.
Roland Barthes’ dismissive comment that the tourist guide “testifies to the
futility of all analytical descriptions, those which reject both explanations
and phenomenology” captures the generally negative view of the genre.31
Such characterization, however, discounts the informational nature of the
guide and its contribution to popularizing Orientalist discourse. Indeed,
tourist guides were systematic bodies of encyclopedic knowledge that
provided travelers with information on everything from how to prepare
for the journey to the Orient to detailed descriptions of roads, historical
Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing 199
monuments, religions, languages and even government systems in Oriental
countries. Baedeker’s 1885 guide for travelers to Egypt, for example,
included essays by such distinguished Egyptologists as Georg Moritz
Ebers and Georg Steindorff. Unlike the travelogue, the handbook as a
modern and popular form of Orientalist discourse was a dispersed and
heterogeneous text that borrowed from several disciplinary domains to
educate its user about the Orient.
Whereas the travelogue valorized the figure of heroic adventurer in
search of knowledge about the Orient, the tourist guide positioned the
reader as a potential traveler and Orientalist. In contrast to the individual-
istic style of the travelogue, handbooks exhibited an inclusive attitude,
wishing to address every type of traveler. Quetin’s 1846 Guide du voyageur
en Algérie, for example, lists various types of traveler in its subtitle, such as le
savant [the learned man], l’artiste, l’homme du monde [a worldly or cosmo-
politan man] and even le colon [the colonial settler]. These categories
suggest different uses of the information the handbook can offer. Not
surprisingly, the guidebook does not posit a unidirectional relation with its
readers but involves the reader to refine its information. Acknowledging
“the absence in Eastern countries of those local records and public notices
which are to be found in every town and village of the West,” Murray’s
Hand-Book, for example, encourages its readers to check – to confirm or
deny the accuracy of the information it provides.32 There is therefore a
circular system of exchange between the tourist and the guide, positioning
the reader as a potential contributor to correct any factual error. In contrast
to the travelogue, in which the reader is positioned as a passive consumer of
the heroic traveler’s adventures, the guide demands an active reader who
participates in the production of practical knowledge. It is not fortuitous
that the tourist guide makes a conscious attempt to turn its readers into
serious travelers by augmenting their desire for adventure and exoticism.
Murray’s Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Island, Greece, Turkey and
Constantinople, for example, tells its reader that in the Orient “[y]ou are in
immediate contact with nature” and that “[e]very circumstance of scenery
and climate becomes of interest and value” and that “[y]ou are constantly
in the full enjoyment of the open air of a heavenly climate – its lightness
passes to the spirits – its serenity sinks into the mind.”33 Similarly, Quetin’s
tour guide represents the Orient as a “natural” theater where the tourist can
experience the untouched natural scenery and observe the exotic and
colorful costumes of Oriental people. In this sense, the handbook is not
merely a guide for the traveler but productive of his desire for travel to the
Orient.
200 ali behdad
To the extent that the tourist guide has the potential to transform the
middle-class tourist into an amateur Orientalist, it marks a significant
reconfiguration of Europe’s discourse about the Orient. Indeed, the hand-
book has an important role in both the production and dissemination of
Orientalist knowledge. As the word “handbook” suggests, the large body of
Orientalist knowledge, once a heavy burden on the traveler, now served as
a vade-mecum, a helping hand, to be held in the hand and to be carried by
every traveler as a necessary travel accessory. The emergence of handbooks,
in other words, attests to the inception of an advanced stage of Orientalist
knowledge production and dissemination in which different modes of
observing and representing the Oriental other are now systematically
packaged as the guide for every traveler, from the savant to the worldly
man, from the artist to the colonizer. As a guiding manual, the handbook
offered the tourist a fully programmed approach to the Orient by mapping
a suitable itinerary, determining the important sites to visit, planning the
appropriate activities and, indeed, defining the desire for the Orient itself.
In this sense, the emergence of the tourist guide marked a new and more
hegemonic stage in the evolution of both travel writing and Orientalism by
perpetuating and popularizing the desire for Oriental exoticism at a time
when European hegemony had already transformed the Orient into a
familiar space.

Notes
1. Gustave Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Paris: Éditions du Boucher,
2002), p. 70, author’s translation.
2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 2–3.
3. Said, Orientalism, p. 12, original emphasis.
4. For a discussion of the problematic tendency in Said to view Orientalism in
monolithic terms, see Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in Age of
Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
5. Pierre Martino, L’Orient dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Hachette, 1906), p. 44, author’s translation.
6. Jean de Thévenot, Voyage du Levant (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1980),
p. 31, author’s translation.
7. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les six voyages de Turquie et de Perse (Paris: Librairie
François Maspero, 1981), 1: p. 39, author’s translation.
8. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Nouvelle relation de l’intérieur du sérail du Grand
Seigneur: contenant plusieurs singularitez qui jusqu’icy n’ont point esté mises en
lumière (Paris: Olivier de Varennes, 1675), not paginated, author’s translation.
9. Said, Orientalism, p. 117.
Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing 201
10. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New
York: Routledge, 1992), p. 15.
11. Claude-Étienne Savary, Lettres sur l’Égypte (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Institut
Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1932), p. 1, author’s translation.
12. Constantin-François de Chassebeuf Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie
(Paris: Mouton & Co., 1959), p. 21, author’s translation.
13. Said, Orientalism, p. 150.
14. Savary, Lettres, p. ii.
15. Volney, Voyage, p. 23.
16. Savary, Lettres, p. iii.
17. Volney, Voyage, p. 23.
18. Said, Orientalism, p. 103.
19. Savary, Lettres, p. iv.
20. Volney, Voyage, p. 23.
21. For a detailed discussion of the implication of this shift, see Michel Foucault,
Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith, (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 166–177.
22. Said, Orientalism, p. 130.
23. Foucault, Archeology, p. 173.
24. Sir Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah &
Meccah, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1964), I: p. 1.
25. Burton, Pilgrimage, 1: p. 3.
26. Burton, Pilgrimage, 1: p. 2.
27. Gérard de Nerval, Le Voyage en Orient, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion,
1980), 1: p. 55, author’s translation.
28. Nerval, Voyage, 1: p. 149.
29. Nerval, Voyage, 1: p. 337.
30. Nerval, Voyage, 2: p. 361.
31. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1972), p. 75.
32. John Murray, A Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey,
Asia Minor, and Constantinople (London: John Murray, 1840), p. iv.
33. Murray, Handbook, pp. i–ii.
chapter 11

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American

Orientalism
David Weir

Orientalism in the American context differs from its better-known British

and Continental manifestations in some significant respects. Principal
among these is the absence of anything like the centuries-long colonialist
projects that rendered the inhabitants of distant lands of either the Near or
the Far East as subjects – but not citizens – of Western empire. In this
respect, America actually has something in common with India: both were
victims of the commercial and imperial ambitions of Great Britain. The
shared past probably has something to do with the imaginary attachment
certain Americans entertained between themselves and the nations of the
Far East: at different periods and in different ways, they believed that
something of value might be gained by greater exposure to the political,
religious and artistic traditions of China, India and Japan. The Near East
not so much: better known today as the Middle East, it was after all the
Holy Land, the very fount of Christianity that gave the Puritan settlers the
strength and courage they needed to pursue the righteous life in the New
World free of the hated strictures of Church and King. The Calvinist
Congregationalist looked inward, not eastward, led by the light of con-
science, not the Light of Asia. Unitarian Protestants in New England, by
contrast, found theological confirmation of their own beliefs in the reli-
gious systems of the Higher Hinduism that the mythographers of an earlier
era had discovered. This early history of American engagement with
Eastern culture points to another difference between Orientalism as it
was in the United States and as it was in Great Britain or in the
European nations: the experience of the Far East for most Americans was
almost wholly limited to what they read in books or put in their parlors, to
translations from various Asian languages or to furniture, artifacts and bric-
a-bracs, first from China and then from Japan.
Encounters with actual Asians (leaving aside missionary experiences in
India and China) remained quite rare until the powerful railway companies

202
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism 203
engaged cheap Chinese labor to build the transcontinental railway in the
mid-nineteenth century. Once the vast transcontinental project was com-
plete, the workers were no longer welcome, and the nation took legal
action against them in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Possibly the most striking thing about American Orientalism in the nine-
teenth century and in the first half of the twentieth is the degree to which
Americans preferred imaginary over actual Asians. An exception to this
general rule is the interest shown in certain remarkable individuals, such as
the Chinese giant Chang Yu Sing, exhibited by P. T. Barnum in the early
1880s, or the pacifist Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who drew mass
audiences to his lectures on a tour of 1917. But even in these and other cases
(there are numerous examples), an element of the “imaginary” somehow
legitimizes the “actual,” which would otherwise be objectionable.
American acceptance of individuals like Chang and Tagore depended on
their standing with respect to larger racial stereotypes. With his Western
suit and his oversized pocketwatch, Chang emerged as a civilized exception
to the negative stereotype of the “heathen Chinee”; with his meditative
manner and message of peace (not to mention the Nobel Prize he received
in 1913), Tagore confirmed the positive stereotype of the Indian Holy Man.
Chang’s popularity runs parallel with the first legislation to exclude
Chinese immigration, while Tagore’s American celebrity peaked in the
same year that the 1917 Immigration Act, also known as the Asiatic Barred
Zone Act, went into effect. The law set limits and mandated restrictions
(including a literacy test) on all groups of immigrants, but it targeted
Asians in particular. These two examples are not isolated: despite a series
of shameful anti-immigration laws to keep the Oriental out,1 Americans
remained enthusiastic about Oriental religion, Oriental literature and
Oriental art. In many or possibly even most cases, they did so because
they thought Asian culture conferred some positive benefit to lives made
empty by the excesses of American life.
The scenario whereby the spiritual riches of the East serve as a corrective
to the material riches of America is not one that receives a great deal of
attention in Edward Said’s landmark study of 1978. Orientalism sets out to
investigate primarily the role of the European colonial powers – mainly the
French and the British – in forming the Orient as a rich and often contra-
dictory ideological construct reflective of both the cultural and material
demands of the West. For Said, the Orient offers not only a cultural
counter to Europe, “as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience,”
but also all manner of economic advantages, as “an integral part of
European material civilization.” This complex history, he adds, is not
204 david weir
completely shared by Americans, who “will not feel quite the same about
the Orient” and whose understanding “will seem considerably less dense.”
The focus on the Islamic Orient of the Arabic, Persian and Ottoman
populations of the Middle East is another element of Said’s book that
limits its relevance to American Orientalism. Said does say that “since
World War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as
France and Britain once did.” He mentions in his acknowledgments that
the bulk of the book was written “during 1975–1976,”2 both significant
years in American history: the first because it marked the end, in April, of
the Vietnam War; the second because it saw the celebration of the
American Bicentennial in July and the election of Jimmy Carter as pre-
sident in November. The strange combination of military defeat, patriotic
celebration and the election of a progressive president (who would go on to
facilitate the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978)
hardly seems conducive to comparisons likening the United States during
the height of the Cold War to France and Great Britain in the age of
colonial empire. If anything, America was demoralized and chastened by
its failure in Vietnam, so it seems odd that Said should insist in the mid-
1970s that the United States has inherited the mantle of Orientalism from
the European powers.
If Said’s claims about the meaning of American Orientalism in the latter
half of the twentieth century seem overstated, his assessment of American
Orientalism prior to 1950 is understated, almost dismissive: “[I]n the
United States knowledge of the Orient never passed through the refining
and reticulating and reconstructive processes, whose beginning was in
philological study, that it went through in Europe.”3 On the contrary,
those “refining and reticulating and reconstructive processes,” inspired by
philological investigation, are very much a part of the American experience
of the Orient, which begins in the eighteenth century with the printing,
however limited, of classic Chinese texts in translation and the widespread
study of mythographic material about Eastern systems of religion. In 1738
Benjamin Franklin printed extracts from “the Ta hio [Da xue], or The
Great Science,” using the title “From the Morals of Confucius” in the
Pennsylvania Gazette.4 Later in the century, Thomas Jefferson took such
great interest in the Comte de Volney’s mythographic analysis of the
relation of Eastern religion and Eastern empire that he made his own
anonymous translation of it.5 Both Franklin’s and Jefferson’s interest in
the philosophy and the religion of the Far East was explicitly political:
Franklin, long an apologist for enlightened despotism before his somewhat
grudging acceptance of the need for revolution in 1775, found in Confucius
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism 205
confirmation of the kind of reasoned, moral authoritarianism he advocated
during the colonial period. By contrast, Jefferson meant to counter author-
itarianism by looking to the work of his friend Volney (the Frenchman
visited Monticello on his American tour of 1795)6 to support arguments
about the need for the separation of church and state. True, these early
American efforts to engage intellectually with Eastern thought are fraught
with error and misunderstanding, but such is the necessary and inevitable
first stage that allows for a later process of refining, reticulating and
reconstructing knowledge, which is precisely what occurred over the next
two centuries.
After the limited engagement with early translations and mythographic
interpretations of Far Eastern culture on the part of the American philo-
sophes Franklin and Jefferson, the next stage was mostly theological and
mostly confined to Hinduism, the principal actors in this part of the story
being New England Unitarian churchmen and their Concord contempor-
aries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The transcenden-
tal philosophy of these two figures, that of Thoreau especially, also
included interest in Confucianism and even Buddhism, in addition to
the larger awareness of Hinduism that carried over from the early
Unitarian phase. By the middle of the nineteenth century, American
Orientalism had begun to include a scholarly dimension with the appoint-
ment in 1841 of the German-trained philologist Edward E. Salisbury (1812–
1901) to teach Sanskrit at Yale University and with the founding of the
American Oriental Society in 1842. Later in the century, with the opening
of Japan to the West in 1868 by the Meiji dynasty, Americans regarded
Buddhism as a rich source for both scholarly investigation and aesthetic
reflection. In the early twentieth century, prior scholarly and philological
involvement in Sanskrit combined with highly aesthetic approaches to
Japanese culture during the fin de siècle to fuel the rise of modernism, with,
for example, T. S. Eliot exploiting Hindu and Buddhist traditions and Ezra
Pound finding cultural material in ancient Japan. In addition to the
theological, scholarly and aesthetic manifestations of American
Orientalism, popular culture also provides numerous examples of
Orientalist trends. P. T. Barnum, by most accounts the originator of
mass entertainment, staged Oriental exhibitions from the mid-nineteenth
century on, as the earlier example of Chang the Chinese Giant shows.
Barnum’s contemporary Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (they both died in
1891) concocted a strange mixture of occult and Oriental theology called
Theosophy that became a mass movement but also had a bizarre bearing on
the development of modernist literature.7 Through all of these
206 david weir
permutations, the Orient retained a certain power as a potential source of
political insight, theological solace, scholarly curiosity and artistic inspira-
tion, a positive legacy made all the more remarkable by the reprehensible
history of Asian immigration in the United States.
That history does not begin until fairly late in the nineteenth
century, with the Exclusion Act of 1882. Neither the political prelude
to American interest in the Orient on the part of Franklin and
Jefferson nor the more extensive theological involvement of New
England Unitarians and Transcendentalists in the early nineteenth
century includes any direct contact with Asian peoples on American
soil. That said, the absence of actual Orientals on American shores did
not preclude the influence of certain remarkable individuals on
American conceptions of the Far East. The earliest example of what
would turn out to be a continuing pattern is the secular Brahmin
Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), whose theological disputes with Baptist
missionaries at the Danish colony of Serampore near Calcutta made
him something of a celebrity among Boston Unitarians, even though
they would never meet him in person. Roy’s American reputation was
promulgated by means of the Unitarian press, primarily the Christian
Register, which recounted in detail the controversy with the Baptist
missionaries. In 1820, Roy published a redaction of the Gospels titled
The Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness, extolling the
teachings of Jesus for their morality and rationality. The book was
published by the Baptist Mission Press and was originally meant to be
used for conversion purposes in a Bengali translation. But because
Roy’s rational emphasis on ethical conduct omitted mention of the
miracles of Jesus, the Baptist missionaries turned against the book
they themselves had published, and no translation was ever made.
Roy’s relationship to the Baptists became even more fraught when he
attempted to collaborate with the Reverends William Yates and
William Adam on a translation of the four Gospels from the original
Greek. Roy insisted that the best translation of the Greek word dia in
John 1:3 should be “through,” not “by,” as the King James version has
it: “All things were made by Him”. His Baptist co-translators con-
curred, unwittingly committing something close to heresy. As one
critic observes, translating the passage as “All things were made
through Him” was tantamount “to asserting the Vedantic theory of
creation by emanation and contradicted the Church doctrine of crea-
tion by God’s command.”8 The ensuing controversy put an end to
Roy’s involvement with the Trinitarian missionaries and even led the
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism 207
Reverend Adam to abandon the Baptists and start his own Unitarian
Church at Calcutta. The action earned the Reverend the disrespectful
epithet “the second fallen Adam” among his former coreligionists.9
Mary Moody, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aunt, was among the numerous
Boston Unitarians who followed the religious saga of Rammohun Roy in
the pages of the Christian Register. In 1822 she sent her nephew news of the
Indian Brahmin’s theological adventures with the Baptist missionaries, and
he wrote back to thank her with this telling comment: “I know not any
more about your Hindu convert than I have seen in the Christian Register,
and am truly rejoiced that the Unitarians have one trophy to build upon
the plain where the zealous Trinitarians have builded thousands.”10 The
comment is telling because the reference to Roy as a “Hindu convert”
betrays confusion about who converted whom; after all, it was Adams, not
Roy, who underwent a conversion experience and abandoned his
Trinitarian views. The confusion Emerson evinces in this particular case
became a constant in his engagement with Asia. A frequently cited example
of his uncertain grasp of fundamental Asiatic matters is the comment
Emerson made in a letter to his sister in the mid-1840s when he called
“the ‘Bhagvat-Geeta’” the “much renowned book of Buddhism.”11 The
translation of the Hindu classic that Emerson read was the one by Charles
Wilkins done in 1785, the first into English. An official with the British East
India Company, Wilkins held Unitarian views and reflected those views in
his translation, which probably helps to account for the book’s circulation
among “Brahmin” Bostonians like Emerson.
Although Emerson eventually modulated his thinking away from
Unitarianism, he continued to rely on variants of Hinduism to supplement
the philosophical sensibility that soon took the name of
Transcendentalism. “Variants” here is a generous term, since Emerson’s
understanding of Hindu tradition continued to be marked by misunder-
standing. A measure of this misunderstanding can be taken by a glance at
the “Ethical Sayings” sections of The Dial, the journal Emerson founded
with Margaret Fuller to air Transcendental thought. In the July 1842 issue
of the journal, Emerson extracted axioms from Wilkins’ translation of the
Heetepades of Veeshnoo-Sarma that must have satisfied the sage Bostonian’s
need for profundity. His purpose in doing so was not to provide instances
of Hindu thought, exactly, but examples of what Emerson imagined to be
the content of Universal Scripture, as he explains in a headnote to the
selections: “Each nation has its bible more or less pure; none has yet been
willing or able in a wise and devout spirit to collate its own with those of
the other nations, and sinking the civil-historical and the ritual portions to
208 david weir
bring together the grand expressions of the moral sentiment in different
ages and races, the rules for the guidance of life, the bursts of piety and of
abandonment to the Invisible and Eternal; – a work inevitable sooner or
later, and which we hope is to be done by religion and not by literature.”12
In other words, Emerson hopes to eliminate the culturally specific portions
of the Hitopadesa just as, in the “Divinity School Address,” he urges
omission of “historical Christianity” from the New Testament to better
intuit “the moral sentiment” therein.13 A more culturally appropriate sense
of the Hitopadesa might have acknowledged the work for what it is, “not a
piece of sacred literature” but “a manual of instruction in practical politics
and economics” for use by the sons of kings to help deal with the
unscrupulous nature of their eventual subjects.14 The royal advice is con-
veyed in the form of animal fables, spoken by the likes of Durganta the
lion, Hiranyaka the mouse, Chitra-greeva the pigeon and so on. This
dimension of the Hitopadesa was not exactly unknown in Emerson’s day.
In fact, Wilkins’ introduction mentions that the great Orientalist William
Jones had likened the fables to Æsop.15 But Emerson chose to ignore the
particulars of Oriental scholarship in favor of the universals of transcen-
dental philosophy.
Emerson’s posture with respect to this Asiatic material runs counter to
the next phase in the American awakening to the literature of the Far East.
Even as Emerson mined ancient Hindu texts for transcendental meaning,
American interest in the Far East inched toward a new, more scholarly
understanding that, for the first time, began to take account of the original
languages in which those ancient texts were written. The first course in
Sanskrit offered in the United States was evidently the one taught in 1836 at
the City University of New York by the Bavarian-born Hebrew scholar
Isaac Nordheimer (1809–1842), who had studied philology in Munich.16
Nordheimer’s plans to professionalize Orientalism were cut short by his
early death, but a year before he died Yale University established the first
chair in Oriental languages by appointing Salisbury to teach Arabic and
Sanskrit. Salisbury was also quite active in the American Oriental Society,
founded in 1842 by a mixture of businessmen and Congregationalist
ministers. Although the Society’s early interests tended toward the transla-
tion of the Gospels into Asian languages for missionary purposes, the
involvement of scholars like Salisbury (who had studied in Berlin with
the great philologist Franz Bopp)17 assured that a more secular, intellectual
attitude would eventually take hold. Curiously, some of Emerson’s associ-
ates in the Transcendental movement appear to have sensed the scholarly
turn in American Orientalism and cultivated a more reserved, careful
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism 209
approach to Eastern texts. The grandiose Emerson was after universal
wisdom in whatever form he could find it: his selections for the “Ethical
Scriptures” sections of The Dial are in fact wildly “universal” (one issue
might feature extracts from the Divine Pimander of Hermes Trismegistus
and the next selections from the “Chaldean Oracles” translated by the
British Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor). The context suggests that, strangely,
there is nothing specifically Oriental about Emerson’s Orientalism. By
contrast, Henry David Thoreau appears to have been more discriminating
in his efforts to understand differences between Confucianism, say, and
Buddhism. Thoreau’s interest in Buddhism is especially noteworthy, since
that culture was virtually unknown in mid-nineteenth-century America.
His interest derives from Eugene Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du
buddhisme indien (1844) and from Thoreau’s Concord contemporary
Elizabeth Peabody (1804–1894), who translated extracts of Burnouf’s
French version of The Lotus Sutra as “The Preaching of Buddha” for the
January 1844 issue of The Dial, a translation long thought to have been
done by Thoreau.18
The misattribution of Peabody’s translation of Burnouf to Thoreau
brings us to another point about American Orientalism that might be
said to lie in the interstices between theology and scholarship: the use of
Eastern faith as a guide to personal conduct. Readers of Walden (1854)
should have no trouble concurring in the view that Thoreau’s best-known
book means to examine the question of how best to live in the world.
Certain passages from Walden work in concert with sections of Thoreau’s
correspondence to suggest that the man had found inspiration for the
quiet, reflective life he sought to pursue in his simple cabin on Walden
Pond by looking to the Far East. An 1849 letter to his friend Harrison Blake
contains the surprising claim that Thoreau “would fain practice the yoga
faithfully.” He adds that, “[t]o some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am
a yogi.”19 In Walden, Thoreau says he understands “what the Orientals
meant by contemplation and the forsaking of works” after sitting “in my
sunny doorway from sunrise to noon, rapt in revery.”20 The Walden
passage echoes the title of the fourth chapter, or “lecture,” of Wilkins’
translation of the Bhagavad-gita, “Of the Forsaking of Works.” In that
chapter and others, Krishna explains to Arjuna the importance of “forsak-
ing the fruits of action for obtaining eternal salvation” and lectures the
reluctant warrior on the nature of those “works” – i.e. “the fruits of actions”
– that are best abandoned. “A disinterested mind,” he says, “who, in all
things, is free from inordinate desires, obtaineth a perfection unconnected
with works.” From Wilkins, also, Thoreau probably got some idea of what
210 david weir
it might mean to “practice the yoga.” The words yoga and yogi do not
appear in Walden, but Wilkins’ description of the “Yōgēē” who “constantly
exerciseth the spirit in private” seems something that Thoreau might well
have taken to heart: “He is recluse, of a subdued mind and spirit . . . He
planteth his own seat firmly on a spot that is undefiled, neither too high nor
too low, and sitteth upon the sacred grass.”21 The best-known example of
Thoreau’s Orientalizing impulse in Walden, the fable of “an artist in the
city of Kouroo,”22 also owes something to Wilkins’ translation of the
Bhagavad-gita, though how much is hard to say. Thoreau’s “Kouroo”
seems an echo of the name Ko˘o˘ro˘o˘ in Wilkins, the name of the place
(Kuru in modern transliteration) where the sons of Pāndu and the sons
of Dhritarāshtra ready for battle. However the fable of the artist so focused
and dedicated to the perfection of his art that he escapes the effects of time
is interpreted, surely it matters that Thoreau has chosen a Hindu context
for it.
The mere association of Far Eastern culture with art in Thoreau’s
parable is something new. Although Thoreau should not receive credit
for the late nineteenth-century shift in interest from Oriental theology to
Oriental aesthetics, the change is certainly noteworthy because the increas-
ingly secular nature of American society from the late nineteenth century
on harmonizes with a growing focus on the relevance of art in assessments
of the value and meaning of the Oriental world. Aesthetic values came to
the fore as never before when Japan was opened to the West in the
aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, so called because the power of govern-
ance was restored to the imperial court, led by the Emperor Meiji. Prior to
the Restoration, Japan was effectively a closed feudal society, ruled con-
tinuously by the Togugawa shogunate since 1603. During the Meiji period,
which runs until 1912, Japan embarked on a period of rapid modernization,
a program that included official invitations to Western scientists and
intellectuals to teach at Japanese universities. One of the most influential
of the scientists was Edward S. Morse, a native of Salem, Massachusetts,
and a devotee of Darwin noted for his expertise in the evolution of
brachiopods. Morse’s role in the aesthetic awakening of America to
Japan is twofold. First, he developed an interest in Japanese ceramics and
amassed a huge collection, later shipped to his native New England to form
the foundation of the Morse Collection of Japanese pottery at the Museum
of Fine Arts in Boston. Second, he recruited other New Englanders to
come to Japan and participate in the modernization program by teaching
subjects that were more philosophical and literary than those of the severely
scientific Morse, whose fascination with ceramics always reflected his
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism 211
naturalistic orientation (he was more a taxonomist of ceramic “specimens”
than a connoisseur of art). Among Morse’s recruits, no one was more
important to the aesthetic turn in American Orientalism than Ernest
Fenollosa, who came to Japan to teach the social Darwinism of Herbert
Spencer and the dialectical philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. Spencer’s
philosophy of economic individualism may have helped to lay the ground-
work for capitalism in the island nation, but it was Hegel’s idealism that
helped lead Fenollosa toward an idiosyncratic understanding of Japanese
and Chinese culture that was to have far-reaching effects in the age of
modernism shortly to follow.
The confluence of Fenollosa’s Hegelianism and his Orientalism was
triggered by a commonplace observation that Morse and other Americans
habitually made about Eastern culture, Japanese especially: that it was not
just different from Western culture – it was actually an inversion of it.
Morse writes that “in many operations we do just the reverse of the
Japanese” – “the last page of our books would be the first page of theirs,”
for example.23 Percival Lowell, who traveled to the Far East in the early
1880s, also argued that the “Far Oriental” (a term encompassing the
Japanese, Chinese and Koreans) was literally the opposite of the “Near
Occidental.” In the case of the Japanese, he wrote, “the world stands
reversed” in such great degree that when “we gaze at them” we seem to
be “viewing our own humanity in some mirth-provoking mirror of the
mind.”24 This sense of inversion or contrariety made it easy for the
Harvard Hegelian Fenollosa to make East and West the terms of a
dialectical argument; that much is unsurprising. What is surprising is the
form the argument took, for Fenollosa came to regard the result of the
dialectical interplay of Western thesis and Eastern antithesis as a higher
synthesis that might lead to a new world culture, no less. Fenollosa knew
from reading Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837) that
America would ultimately be revealed as “the land of the future,” a nation
that would one day abandon “the historical lumber-room of Old Europe”
where “hitherto the History of the World has developed itself.” Fenollosa
also learned from Hegel that “[t]he History of the World travels from East
to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning.”25
Fenollosa concluded that, if history had indeed ended in Europe, it could
be renewed in America by a return to Asia, where history had originated,
thereby realizing a synthesis of East and West.
At first, Fenollosa’s Hegelian fantasies seem removed from the work for
which he is best known, thanks to Ezra Pound, namely The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry. But that book opens with a vague cultural
212 david weir
prediction informed by Fenollosa’s Hegelian concept of a new world
culture created by the synthesis of East and West: “This twentieth century
not only turns a new page in this history of the world, but opens another
and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world
embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed
responsibilities for nations and races.”26 What Pound took away from
the manuscript Fenollosa’s wife had entrusted to him in 1908 was mainly
the idea that the Chinese language, because of its supposed “ideographic”
nature, provided a more direct, precise indication of the relationship of
word to thing than Western languages could offer. Hence Chinese was an
ideal medium for poetry, imagism especially: Pound followed Fenollosa in
thinking that Chinese characters conveyed miniature images of ideas. The
notion is mistaken, of course; the Chinese writing system is phonographic,
not pictographic, despite the fact that a small portion of the characters
originated in pictograms (and even the “pictographic” characters convey
meaning by the arbitrary sounds assigned to them, not by their visual
resemblance to things). Fenollosa’s thinking was deeply informed by his
reading of Emerson, whose works he taught to his Japanese students
around the same time that he began to turn his attention to Chinese
literature.27 In “Nature,” for example, Emerson claimed: “As we go back
in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is
all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.”28
Fenollosa found in the Chinese character the perfect illustration of “pic-
turesque” representation. Indeed, what seems to be the case is that his
reading of Fenollosa led Pound to Orientalize Emerson even more that
Emerson had Orientalized himself: “Chinese for Pound meant the recov-
ery or reinvention of Adamic speech, ‘in which words contain the essence
of the things they name,’ a return to the world Emerson had outlined.”29
Fenollosa therefore aided Pound in the development of his poetic method,
but he also provided material that enabled Pound to put that method to
work in order to produce some of the finest poetry of the early twentieth
century. Both Cathay (1915), a collection of poems translated from the
Chinese, and Certain Noble Plays of Japan, reprinted as “Noh,” or
Accomplishment (1917), owe their origins to the manuscripts Pound
received from Fenollosa’s widow, Mary. Although Pound would go on
to darker Oriental explorations with his use of Confucius to justify author-
itarian ideology in the 1930s, notably in the 1935 pamphlet Jefferson and/or
Mussolini, his earlier Japanese- and Chinese-inspired transformations of
English poetry remain one of the more enduring examples of how Eastern
tradition can supplement and validate American culture. After all, much of
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism 213
Pound’s vaunted modernism has its origins in that same New England
Orientalism that suffused the thinking of Fenollosa, whose ideas, in turn,
owed so much to Emerson.
Pound’s one-time protégé T. S. Eliot also participates in the tradi-
tion of New England Orientalism, but Eliot did not use Indic tradi-
tion for the purpose of poetic innovation. Where Pound found
support in Chinese and Japanese literature for his own efforts to
renovate English poetry, Eliot used the scholarly knowledge of
Sanskrit he acquired at Harvard to supplement and complicate the
philosophical ideas and religious sentiments in both his criticism and
his poetry. In a series of essays over the long course of his career, Eliot
sought to articulate the concept of wisdom in poetry and used the
Bhagavad-gita, “the next greatest philosophical poem to the Divine
Comedy within my experience,”30 to explain the concept. The problem
Eliot sets himself is the difficulty of distinguishing wisdom from both
philosophy and religion. The appeal of the Bhagavad-gita cannot lie in
the philosophical or religious dimensions of Hinduism because those
elements are culturally removed from the Western reader. But the
great Western poets Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe also are removed
from the modern reader in various ways, yet all three possess some-
thing in common that assures their continuing permanence and uni-
versality. That something is wisdom: “Whether the ‘philosophy’ or the
religious faith of Dante or Shakespeare or Goethe is acceptable to us or
not . . . there is the Wisdom that we can all accept.”31 Eliot the critic
seems intent on providing support for Eliot the poet by devising a
critical template to cast the philosophical and religious dimensions of
his work into the realm of wisdom poetry. That maneuver seems to lie
behind his incorporation of Sanskrit words into The Waste Land
(1922), notably the concluding line: “Shantih shantih shantih.” Eliot’s
note to the line informs the reader that “‘The peace which passeth
understanding’ is our equivalent to this word” (emphasis added),32 as if
to say that some larger wisdom encompasses both religious traditions.
An even clearer example of the relation of Indic literature to Eliot’s
wisdom voice is his use of a modern persona of Krishna in “The Dry
Salvages” (1941), one of the long philosophical poems that comprise
The Four Quartets. Even before Krishna is named outright, Eliot
evokes the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation that Krishna elaborates
to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-gita when he articulates one of his more
constant themes, the relation of individual experience to cultural
tradition:
214 david weir
I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations . . .33
Later in the same poem, the allusion to the Bhagavad-gita becomes
explicit: “So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna / On the field
of battle.”34 Since “The Dry Salvages” was composed during the
London Blitz (September 1940–May 1941),35 Eliot’s evocation of the
bygone battle on the field of Kuru suggests that the modern Anglo-
Catholic poet means to match the wisdom of the ancient Hindu
author.
High-culture Orientalism reaches a kind of culmination in the
wartime poetry of T. S. Eliot. After World War II, when the
American economy took off and consumer society began to flourish,
pop-culture Orientalism began to emerge more forcefully than ever
before. The best-known instigators of this development are the Beat
Generation writers Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder.
While their work might be more properly described as countercul-
tural, such explorations of the Far East became increasingly asso-
ciated with popular culture, as illustrated by the involvement with
the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his transcendental mediation move-
ment on the part of the Beatles and other celebrities in the late
1960s. Historically, popularizations of Eastern culture in the latter
half of the twentieth century are traceable to a major event in the
nineteenth: the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in
conjunction with the Columbia Exposition of 1893. The Parliament’s
organizers understood Far Eastern faiths as meaningful but incom-
plete – because their adherents had not experienced Christian revela-
tion. Needless to say, a number of representatives from India and
Japan challenged this notion. The Indian Hindu delegation, led by
the charismatic Swami Vivekananda, used pseudo-Darwinian lan-
guage to argue that all religions were subject to spiritual “laws”
that would lead toward the “evolution” of an all-encompassing,
universal faith. The Japanese Buddhists, headed by Shaku Soen,
chief abbot of a Renzai Zen temple, and his younger, layman
associate Hirai Kinzo, challenged the primacy of Christianity in
both moral and political terms by criticizing the misuse of
American power in Japan and other Eastern nations.36 Both
Vivekananda and Shaku went on to enjoy successful lecture careers
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism 215
in the United States after the parliament, with Vivekananda found-
ing the Ramakrishna movement in America.37 But Shaku Soen’s
influence as a lecturer and author intent on explaining Zen
Buddhism to Americans was more far-reaching, mainly because of
the man who accompanied him, his student and translator D. T.
Suzuki.
Suzuki, in fact, emerges as a kind of missing link in mass culture
responses to Eastern thought in the United States, the connection between
the first efforts to popularize Zen Buddhism in the first decade of the
twentieth century and the second efflorescence of Zen in the post–World
War II period. Although Suzuki did not return to the United States until
1950 (to lecture on Zen Buddhism at Columbia University), he had
published a number of books in English, including Essays in Zen
Buddhism (First Series) (1927) and Essays in Zen Buddhism (Second Series)
(1933). The parenthetical subtitles of the two books of essays on Zen
Buddhism are evidently intended to evoke Emerson, who likewise sub-
titled his essay collections First Series and Second Series.38 The Emersonian
allusion seems to be an effort to “Americanize” Zen Buddhism, a tendency
validated by Suzuki’s best-known book, Zen and Japanese Culture (1959).
That study is replete with comparisons of Zen Buddhism to American
thought. For example, Suzuki quotes Emerson’s poem “Brahma” as a way
of illustrating the psychology of Zen swordsmanship and finds analogies in
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to Renzai spirituality. In Jack Kerouac’s The
Dharma Bums (1958), the character Japhy Ryder, a fictional avatar of the
Beat poet Snyder, is a practitioner of Zen Buddhism who lives in a twelve-
by-twelve shack, sleeps on a straw mat and reads, along with sutras and
haikus, “the complete works of D. T. Suzuki.”39 This fictional illustration
of Suzuki’s influence could be multiplied many times over in the examples
of such San Francisco Renaissance figures as Kenneth Rexroth, Alan Watts
and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, not to mention Ginsberg, Kerouac and Snyder
himself.
One of the cultural ironies of this Bay Area Orientalism is that it opened
the way not just to a broader acceptance of Far Eastern culture by the
American public but also to an increasing commercialization of that
culture. Today, transcendental meditation is trademarked as TM, every
strip mall has a Chinese martial arts studio and Indian yoga is a billion-
dollar industry. No doubt the tendency was helped along by changing
attitudes toward Asian immigrants, partly the result of such major legisla-
tion as the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which lifted existing strictures against
Asian immigrants and Asian residents, and the Indochina Migration and
216 david weir
Refugee Act of 1975, which aided resettlement of significant numbers of
Vietnamese people in the United States after the American defeat in
Vietnam. The influx of Asian immigrants immediately after these two
major pieces of legislation was profound and continues to be so.
According to the US census of 2010, the “race group” that increased
more than any other in the ten years after the 2000 census was Asian,
growing four times faster than the general population as well as faster than
any other race group. As of 2010, the Asian population numbered just
above 17.3 million, or 5.6 percent of the total population.40 If American
Orientalism in the past was driven by ideological fantasies made all the
more fantastic by the absence of direct experience with Asian peoples, the
fact that more and more of those peoples are now citizens of the United
States is bound to have an effect on American attitudes toward
them – mainly because they are no longer “them” but “us.” For this reason,
the Far East is hardly the rich source of Orientalism today that it was in the
nineteenth century or even in the middle of the twentieth century. As for
the Near East – that is a different and darker story, one that has become so
complex and disturbing that the academic concept of American
Orientalism hardly seems adequate to address it.

Notes
1. For details of the immigration legislation of 1882, 1888, 1892, 1902 and 1917, as
well as the quota system imposed by the Immigration Law of 1924, see the
Congressional Record, as follows: 47th Congress, 1st Sess. (May 6, 1882): chap.
126; 50th Congress, 1st Sess. (October 1, 1888): chap. 1064; 57th Congress, 1st
Sess. (May 5, 1892): chap. 60; 57th Congress, 1st Sess. (April 29, 1902): chap.
641; 64th Congress, 2nd Sess. (February 5, 1917): chap. 29; 68th Congress, 1st
Sess. (May 26, 1924): chap. 190.
2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 1–2, p. 4, p. xi.
3. Said, Orientalism, p. 290.
4. “ From the Morals of Confucius,” Pennsylvania Gazette, February 28–May 7,
1738, p. 2.
5. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 32: pp. 441–442n.
6. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. John Cantanzariti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997), 27: p. 390n.
7. See, for example, Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S.
Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1993).
8. J. P. Rao Rayapati, Early American Interest in Vedanta (New York: Asia
Publishing House, 1973), p. 78.
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism 217
9. Igbal Singh, Rammohun Roy: A Biographical Inquiry into the Making of
Modern India, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1983), 3:
p. 255.
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson to Mary Moody Emerson, 10 June 1822. Cited in
James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols. (Boston and
New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1887), 1: pp. 80–81.
11. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols. (New York,
1939), 3: p. 290.
12. “ Veeshnoo Sarma,” The Dial 3:1 (July 1842): p. 82.
13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” Essays and Lectures
(New York: New American Library, 1983), p. 76, p. 86.
14. William Bysshe Stein, “Introduction,” in Hitopadesa: Fables and Proverbs from
the Sanskrit (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968 [1787]), pp.
v–vi.
15. Charles Wilkins quotes from Jones on this point in his preface; see
“Translator’s Preface,” in Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit, Being the
“Hitopadesa,” trans. Charles Wilkins (London: Routledge, 1885 [1787]), p. 10.
16. Dale Riepe, The Philosophy of India and Its Impact on American Thought
(Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1970), p. 22; Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred
Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 164–165.
17. Riepe, The Philosophy of India, p. 12.
18. Wendell Piez, “Anonymous Was a Woman – Again,” Tricycle: The Buddhist
Review 3 (Fall 1993): pp. 10–11.
19. Henry David Thoreau to Harrison Blake, November 20, 1849. Familiar
Letters of Henry David Thoreau, ed. F. B. Sanborn (Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1894), pp. 210–211.
20. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden,
The Maine Woods, Cape Cod (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 411.
21. The Bhagvat-Geeta, trans. Charles Wilkins (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles
and Reprints, 1959 [1785]), p. 51, p. 131, p. 63.
22. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, p. 582.
23. Edward S. Morse, Japan Day by Day: 1877, 1878–79, 1882–83, 2 vols. (Atlanta:
Cherokee, 1990 [1917]), 2: p. 25.
24. Percival Lowell, The Soul of the Far East (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888),
p. 2, p. 3.
25. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibrew (London:
Bohn, 1861), p. 90, p. 109.
26. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed.
Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, n.d. [1936]), p. 3.
27. Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 218.
28. Emerson, “Nature,” Essays and Lectures, p. 22.
29. Ira B. Nadal, “Constructing the Orient: Pound’s American Vision,” in Ezra
Pound and China, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
218 david weir
Press, 2003), p. 17; Nadal quotes Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic
Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1977), p. 143.
30. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964),
p. 219.
31. T. S. Eliot, “Goethe as the Sage,” On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1957), p. 263.
32. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1963), p. 69, p. 76.
33. Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 194.
34. Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 197.
35. Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984),
p. 262.
36. For Vivekananda’s, Shaku’s and Hirai’s addresses, see The World’s Parliament
of Religions, 2 vols., ed. John Henry Barrow (Chicago: Parliament Publishing,
1893), 2: pp. 968–978 (Vivekananda); 2: pp. 829–831, p. 1285 (Shaku); 1: pp.
444–450 (Hirai).
37. Carl T. Jackson, Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the
United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 16–47.
38. For a fuller discussion of this point and Suzuki’s relation to Emerson gen-
erally, see Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2003), pp. 196–197.
39. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, Road Novels 1957–1960, ed. Douglas
Brinkley (New York: Library of America, 2007), p. 292.
40. Elizabeth M. Hoeffel et al., “The Asian Population: 2010,” in 2010 Census
Briefs (Washington, DC: US Bureau of the Census, 2012), pp. 3–4.
chapter 12

Edward Said and Resistance in Colonial

and Postcolonial Literatures
Valerie Kennedy

Edward Said’s work is central to the study and theorization of resistance in

colonial and postcolonial literatures. Although Orientalism (1978) ignored
resistance, Said’s many writings on Palestine, Culture and Imperialism
(1993) and Representations of the Intellectual (1994) provide many of the
parameters for the ﬁelds of postcolonial literary and cultural studies and
postcolonial theory. Culture and Imperialism offers several concepts that
were to become central to resistance in postcolonial studies, but it also
responds to work being done by Mary Louise Pratt, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri
Spivak, Barbara Harlow and others. This chapter focuses on works origin-
ally written in English, thus bypassing the Négritude movement and the
Bengali Renaissance, although Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
(1963) (Les Damnés de la Terre [1961]) will be discussed because Fanon’s
critique of Western colonialism is central to Culture and Imperialism and to
the works of one of the most important postcolonial resistance writers,
Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1969),
although ﬁrst published in Arabic, will also feature because of its relation to
Said’s arguments about resistance in Culture and Imperialism.

Edward Said and Resistance

Despite its groundbreaking role in bringing the combination of politics
and literature into the Western academy,1 Orientalism (1978) neglects
resistance, homogenizes Orientalist discourse and ignores the role of
women in both Orientalism and imperialism.2 The neglect of resistance
in Orientalism is related to Said’s espousal of a form of Western humanism
that takes white, middle-class, male-authored canonical texts and experi-
ence as its central point of reference. Said focuses on Western politics and
literature, scarcely acknowledging resistance either in the colonial period or
in the work of non-Western postcolonial writers. Indeed, in relation to the

219
220 valerie kennedy
colonial period he argues that there was “very little resistance on the
Orient’s part.”3 Moreover, Western Orientalist works are seen from an
excessively homogenizing perspective, which explains why Said is unable to
study “other cultures and other peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepres-
sive and nonmanipulative, perspective,”4 although he recognizes the
urgency of this task. “Orientalism Reconsidered” (1985) stresses the impor-
tance of producing “non-dominative and non-coercive” forms of knowl-
edge, and Said admits that Orientalism ignored the “repressed or resistant
history” of opposition to imperialism.5 He acknowledges the work of non-
Western writers like A. L. Tibawi, Abdullah Laroui and others who
challenge “the authority, provenance, and institutions” of Orientalism
and of the Subaltern Studies group who document popular “resistance to
elite domination” and challenge “the elitism of modern Indian historio-
graphy.”6 There are also references to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and
Homi K. Bhabha, both significant figures in postcolonial studies in rela-
tion to resistance.7
Said’s writings on the Middle East are also significant. In The Question of
Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981) and Blaming the Victims (1988), Said
challenges, respectively, the accepted Western and Israeli versions of
Palestinian history (notably the claim that the Israeli state is “a land with-
out people, for a people without land,”8 which he dismisses as obfuscatory
and Orientalist), the Western media’s representations of Palestinians, and
what, in the subtitle to Blaming the Victims, he calls the “Spurious
Scholarship” relating to Palestine – that is, the perpetration of hegemo-
nic/biased Orientalist visions of the country and its non-Jewish inhabi-
tants. After the Last Sky (1986) provides a combination of textual and
photographic narratives to challenge the hegemonic pro-Israeli view of
Palestinians, and the essays in The Politics of Dispossession (1995), many of
which were written before the publication of Culture and Imperialism, take
up the same issues. In all of these works, Said argues for the need for a
Palestinian narrative of resistance as well as for a Palestinian state; this
means having “Permission to Narrate” (the title of an 1984 essay) the
Palestinian side of the story, because “[f]acts do not at all speak for
themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain,
and circulate them.”9 In other essays like “Intellectuals in the Post-
Colonial World” (1986), he provides examples of resistance in colonial
and postcolonial literary texts, including works by Conrad, Fanon, Ngũgı̃,
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Salih and Salman Rushdie, all of whom figure in Culture
and Imperialism. Similarly, in Representations of the Intellectual (1994), Said
defines the responsibility of public intellectuals like himself as “speak[ing]
Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 221
the truth to power,” questioning and undermining authority, and speaking
for “the weak and unrepresented.”10
Said has said that he thought of Culture and Imperialism as “a sequel to
Orientalism, including the resistances . . . of European and American
intellectuals and scholars,”11 although his failure to mention non-
Western figures here is striking. Some of the key ideas and strategies of
Culture and Imperialism are clearly developments from Orientalism: for
example, Said’s emphasis on the inextricably intertwined histories of the
colonizers and the colonized and his explorations of the colonial compli-
cities of canonical works like Mansfield Park, Heart of Darkness and Kim
recall the earlier focus on Orientalist discourse. However, Said’s analysis of
examples of political and textual resistance to imperialism, notably in
writers like Franz Fanon, and his articulation of the concepts of hybridity
and of contrapuntal reading extend the scope of the earlier work.12 In the
“Introduction” Said argues that there was almost everywhere both “armed
resistance” and “cultural resistance” to imperialism,13 and in chapter 3,
“Resistance and Opposition,” he distinguishes between “‘primary resis-
tance,’” which is political, and “secondary, that is, ideological resistance,”14
although his main focus is literary.
Chapter 3 begins by discussing resistance and liberation movements
between World Wars I and II, citing works by E. M. Forster, André
Gide and André Malraux and taking W. B. Yeats as an example of the
national and nationalist poet. Placing Yeats in the context of Irish nation-
alism causes Said to discuss the problems caused by the collaboration of
what Fanon calls the nationalist bourgeoisie with the colonial or neocolo-
nial powers, although Yeats is also taken as an example of the anti-
imperialist cultural resistance whose primary task was “to reclaim, rename,
and reinhabit the land,” and Said sees him (along with Pablo Neruda, Aimé
Césaire, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Mahmoud Darwish) as one of those writers
who sought to reclaim not only their land but also its heroes, mythology
and language.15 Said admits that Yeats “expresses the predicament of
sharing a language with the colonial overlord,” but he does not acknowl-
edge that the ambiguities of Yeats’ position as a member of the
Irish Protestant Ascendancy makes him a problematic choice as an anti-
imperialist poet.16
In “The Voyage In and the Emergence of Opposition,” Said focuses on
the work of four non-Western writers, seeing James’ The Black Jacobins
(1938), George Antonius’ The Arab Awakening (1938), Ranajit Guha’s A
Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and S. H. Alatas’ The Myth of the Lazy
Native (1977) as key works of resistance literature and examples of what he
222 valerie kennedy
calls “the voyage in” – that is, the “extension into the metropolis of large-
scale mass movements” in the form of “anti-imperialist and scholarly work
done by writers from the peripheries who have immigrated to or are
visiting the metropolis.”17 While he argues that all four resist imperialism,
he seems to prefer the strong narrative lines of James and Antonius to the
irony and hermeneutical suspicion which characterize Guha and Alatas’
more specialized writings, perhaps partly because, as Mary Louise Pratt
suggests, the two earlier writers synthesize Western and “native” cultural
traditions.18
But Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is Said’s most important resis-
tance text. Like Fanon, Said sees nationalism as an essential transitional
stage between political resistance to imperialism and the ideological resis-
tance that leads to the establishment of new states, although, also like
Fanon, he argues that it is not enough.19 Said emphasizes Fanon’s aware-
ness that conventional narrative is generally identified with imperialism
and thus cannot be taken over unproblematically by nationalist move-
ments, which must instead develop “lateral, non-narrative connections
among people whom imperialism separated.”20 But, as Said’s writings on
Palestine show, he also believes in the possibility of a counter-narrative, to
be used as a tool of liberation by previously colonized peoples.
Culture and Imperialism does not always do the subject of colonial
resistance justice. Said modifies Fanon’s uncompromising critique of
European imperialism, asserting that Fanon wants to link Europeans and
natives “in a new non-adversarial community of awareness and anti-
imperialism,” although Fanon specifically excludes from his new imagined
community of “European peoples” and the colonized those whom he calls
“our common masters”21 – that is, the European ruling classes and the
nationalist neocolonial bourgeoisie. Moreover, Said does not endorse
Fanon’s statement that “Europe is literally the creation of the third
World” because of Europe’s exploitation of the raw materials and human
labor of its colonies.22 Again, Rabindranath Tagore is mentioned, but the
Bengali Renaissance is not discussed, and Said fails to see the Orientalism
of Forster’s A Passage to India (1924).
Said does anticipate later discussions of resistance in postcolonial litera-
ture by identifying the significance of rewritings of Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, arguing that Conrad’s novella
is reconfigured in Ngũgı̃’s The River Between (1965) and Salih’s Season of
Migration to the North and that The Tempest is central to George
Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960).23 He also raises the issue of
language and identifies two themes of much postcolonial resistance
Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 223
literature: the rewriting of colonial history and the reassertion of the value
of the colonized culture. Said refers to Ngũgı̃ decision to abandon English
for Gikuyu in the cause of liberation, arguing that “resistance . . . is an
alternative way of conceiving human history” by “writing back” to metro-
politan cultures and making them “acknowledge marginalized or sup-
pressed or forgotten histories”24 and also reviving the colonized culture.
The phrase “writing back” recalls Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen
Tiffin’s 1989 The Empire Writes Back, an anthology of postcolonial writing
focusing on its radical challenge to Eurocentric notions of language and
literature.
Indeed, work by several writers on colonial and postcolonial resis-
tance can be linked to Culture and Imperialism. For example, the idea
of “Overlapping Territories [and] Intertwined Histories” (the title of
the first chapter of Said’s book) is developed by Elleke Boehmer in
her exploration of the interrelation of political and literary resistance
in Ireland and India and of the ways in which imperialism and
resistance to it determined the form and the content of modernist
texts in various ways. Boehmer argues that “an anti-colonial discur-
sivity [was] manifest in literary nationalist as well as more overtly
political writing as early as the late nineteenth century” and that the
empire’s global nature “paradoxically facilitated the rise of cross- or
transnational resistances.”25 Among Boehmer’s examples of Indian
resistance literature are works by Sister Nivedita (born Margaret
Noble) such as Kali, The Mother (1900), The Web of Indian Life
(1904) and Aggressive Hinduism (1905) as well as Sri Aurobindo’s The
Doctrine of Passive Resistance (1948), “New Lamps for Old” (1893) and
some of his poems. In the Indian and Irish contexts, Boehmer
demonstrates how resistance in politics and literature intersect by
showing that works of literary resistance were part of political cam-
paigns relating to the colonies, as in the case of Arthur Griffith’s
“Ballad of the Transvaal Irish Brigade” or Lady Gregory’s “Boer
Ballad in Ireland,”26 and by analyzing the interdependence of political
action and writing in Maud Gonne’s anti-conscription campaign in
World War I and her advocacy of Irish freedom in her autobiography,
A Servant of the Queen (1938). Boehmer’s analysis may also be related
to “A Note on Modernism” in Culture and Imperialism.27 Through
her extended discussions of the overlap between Irish and Indian
literary and political resistance, Boehmer develops Said’s arguments
that European modernism is characterized by various “manifestations
of empire” such as the resisting native and imperial rivalry28 and that
224 valerie kennedy
it responds to “the external pressures . . . of the imperium through
“perceptual uncertainty or hesitancy” and a retreat into the aesthetic
realm.29
Said’s demonstration of the colonial complicities of canonical texts in
Culture and Imperialism is developed by Philip Darby, who argues that
while literary resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism is central to
postcolonial African fiction, general theorizations of postcolonial fiction
tend to romanticize resistance and to neglect the fact that many narratives
by colonial and postcolonial writers from the Indian subcontinent show
“points of convergence with imperial ones.”30 By contrast Said’s comments
on Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o and especially Decolonising the Mind and Ngũgı̃’s
move from English to Gikuyu in fiction can be linked to Neil Lazarus’
discussion of resistance in postcolonial African fiction where he sees Ngũgı̃
as “exemplary” among African writers in his “commitment to a revolu-
tionary conception of intellectualism,” especially his work in popular
theatre with Gikuyu peasants and workers, which caused his
imprisonment.31
Both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism played key roles in
establishing postcolonial studies, where the analysis of resistance is a
main concern. For example, in The Location of Culture (1994), Homi
Bhabha uses concepts like “the in-between,” “not quite/not white,” and
“the third space,” as well as hybridity and colonial mimicry, to focus on the
resistance to and subversion of colonialism and imperialism. Some of
Bhabha’s essays predate Culture and Imperialism, but the relevance of
Orientalism is clear. Gayatri Spivak develops Said’s ideas about alternative
histories or narratives to analyze the position of colonized women and to
theorize resistance. Her “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of
Imperialism” (1985) argues that in Jane Eyre various types of English
identity are established at the expense of that of Bertha Mason, the
colonized woman, so that the novel and much feminist criticism “repro-
duce the axioms of imperialism.”32 In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985),
Spivak argues that the resistance of subaltern or colonized people(s) cannot
be expressed autonomously, since it is subject to the categories of the
dominant discourse which relegate them to a position of subalternity.
Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(1992) can also be seen to derive partly from Orientalism, although Pratt
uses the concept of “transculturation” to examine the resistance involved
when “subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials
transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture”33 more
extensively than Said does. Said’s identification of Heart of Darkness and
Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 225
The Tempest as key works revised in resistance literature has been developed
by critics like Phillip Darby and John Marx.

Resistance in Colonial Literatures

As noted, Culture and Imperialism breaks new ground in emphasizing the
centrality of the imperial framework to canonical nineteenth-century texts:
slavery is linked to the bourgeois world of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
(1814), the ambiguities of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) are discussed at
length (although there is also an ironically Orientalist reading of the
“darkness” metaphor), and the attractions as well as the insidiously
Orientalist and imperialist ethos of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) are
demonstrated.
Said’s analysis of Mansfield Park demonstrates the interdependence of
bourgeois English civilization and colonial slavery seen in the reliance of
the ordered world of Sir Thomas Bertram’s English estate on the colonial
exploitation and violence of his Antiguan slave plantation. Said mentions
the “threatening presence” of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre (1847),34 but he does not point out that, while in Austen’s work the
colonial reality exists only on the periphery, in both Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights (1847) the characters identified with the colonial
world (Bertha Mason and Heathcliff) are brought into the metropolitan
centre and challenge it. Heathcliff’s racial indeterminacy makes him an
example of the class and racial Other, and his whole life is a form of
resistance to the middle-class culture of the Earnshaws and Lintons that
identifies him as a savage. Similarly, Bertha Mason responds to the epis-
temic violence of being labelled a “murderess,” a “wild beast,” a “fiend,” a
“vampyre,” “a hyena,” and a “maniac”35 by the racial and class hegemony
represented by the Rochesters and Masons by trying to kill Rochester,
wounding her brother and finally destroying Thornfield Hall and herself.
In 1985, eight years before Culture and Imperialism, as mentioned, Spivak
had identified Jane Eyre’s complicity in the imperial ethos in “Three
Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” and, doubtless thanks to
both Spivak and Said, Charlotte Brontë’s novel has become a locus classicus
of postcolonial rereading. Spivak’s article might be seen as an example of
Said’s theory and practice in Culture and Imperialism of “contrapuntal
reading” in that it examines Jane’s Eyre’s relation to the much more explicit
dramatization of resistance to the colonial ethos in Jean Rhys’ Wide
Sargasso Sea (1966), where Christophine, the black servant of Antoinette
(the Bertha Mason figure), explicitly criticizes both slavery and the post-
226 valerie kennedy
Emancipation colonial regime and also asserts her resistance to the post-
Emancipation colonial order.36 However, as Spivak asserts, Christophine is
still “tangential” to Rhys’ narrative, because it is a rewriting of “a canonical
English text . . . in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native.”37
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the colonial literary text that is most
central to Culture and Imperialism, reflecting the canonical but controver-
sial status of Conrad’s novella in postcolonial studies, a status due in part to
Chinua Achebe’s 1977 article “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
‘Heart of Darkness.’” Achebe’s critique of Conrad’s novella makes three
main points: Conrad uses Africa only “as a foil to Europe” rather than
seeing it in its own right; he dehumanizes Africa and Africans and deprives
them of speech because he has a racist attitude to black people; and he is a
“purveyor of comforting myths” who offers no “alternative frame of
reference” to the imperialist one.38 Said invokes Achebe’s critique twice,
first defending Conrad by arguing that Achebe ignored “the limitations
placed on Conrad by the novel as an aesthetic form” and then apparently
endorsing Achebe’s charge that Conrad dehumanized Africa and Africans
by stating that the tendency to dehumanize non-European races became
“more prominent and explicit” in Conrad’s later works like Nostromo and
Victory.39 Said also endorses Achebe’s criticism of Eurocentric concepts of
universalism.40 He never directly challenges Achebe’s reading of the novel,
although his discussions of Heart of Darkness do offer a potential or partial
answer to Achebe’s points about Conrad and imperialism. Said argues that,
at the end of the nineteenth century, “the sovereign historical force of
imperialism” meant that “other non-imperialist alternatives [were]
unthinkable,” but he proposes that there are “explicit references to the
outside” in Conrad’s narrative form, references made possible by Conrad’s
exilic status, which allows him to maintain “an ironic distance” from
imperialism.41 These references point “to a perspective outside the basically
imperialist representations provided by Marlow and his listeners” and so
“[unsettle] the reader’s sense . . . of empire [and] reality itself.”42 But Said
never uses these arguments to directly confront Achebe’s critique, which
pays little attention to fictional form.
Indeed, occasionally Said himself seems to succumb to the Orientalism
of Conrad’s text, writing as if the metaphor of darkness were an unproble-
matic descriptive trope. For example, he says: “Conrad’s genius allowed
him to realize that the ever-present darkness could be colonized or illumi-
nated” and that “Heart of Darkness is full of references to . . . benevolent as
well as cruel schemes to bring light to the dark places and peoples of this
world.”43 The expressions “the ever-present darkness” and “dark places and
Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 227
peoples” seem to reinscribe the imperialist and Orientalist view, as does the
later sentence that evokes Conrad’s narrative’s preoccupation “with what
eludes articulate expression . . . Africa’s magnificent, ineffable, dark life.”44
On the earlier occasion, however, the next sentence argues that Kurtz and
Marlow “(and of course Conrad) are ahead of their time in understanding
that what they call ‘the darkness’ has an autonomy of its own, and can
reinvade and reclaim what imperialism has taken for its own,” and Said
criticizes the Eurocentrism and Orientalism of Heart of Darkness by
arguing that, while Conrad, Kurtz and Marlow all “acknowledge the
darkness” as “independent,” since they were products of their time they
could not see that the darkness was a world resisting the empire.45
While Said does mention non-European writers of resistance literature
such as Ngũgı̃, Achebe and Salih in Culture and Imperialism, his main focus
is still on canonical works by European authors: works by non-European
writers receive far less attention than those by European ones. Moreover,
he does not clearly distinguish between European and non-European
resistance in the colonial period, instead amalgamating discussion of the
themes of resistance culture, nationalism and “the voyage in” and thus
blurring the difference between the explicit resistance to imperialism in
non-European writers like Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao and the greater
ambivalence of their European counterparts. For example, Anand’s
Untouchable (1935) criticizes the discrimination against Untouchables by
higher-caste Hindus as well as British racism and “divide and rule” colonial
policies, while Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) dramatizes both Gandhian passive
resistance to and more violent actions against British colonialism; it
represents its author’s conscious attempt to use Indian English and style
to represent the worldview of the colonized rather than that of the
colonizer.

Resistance in Postcolonial Literatures: Deﬁnitions

Barbara Harlow, John Marx, Phillip Darby, Fredric Jameson and Jahan
Ramazani provide some useful guidelines for defining postcolonial resis-
tance literature. Harlow – whose work Said mentions in Culture and
Imperialism and who, in Resistance Literature, thanks both Said and
Spivak for their “support and example” – sees resistance as “a political
and politicized activity” that is “immediately and directly involved in a
struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural
production,” arguing that “[n]arrative . . . provides a more developed
historical analysis of the circumstances of economic, political, and cultural
228 valerie kennedy
domination and repression [than poetry],” an argument supported by the
fact that the most explicit and developed examples of postcolonial resis-
tance are found in fiction.46 Harlow focuses on cultural resistance in the
Middle East, drawing on Said’s ideas of resistant history47 and analyzing
non-canonical works by non-Western writers, including a number by
Palestinians, some also discussed by Said, such as Halim Barakat,
Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani. For his part, Marx argues
that postcolonial literature resists colonial or neocolonial ideology either
by “repudiat[ing] the canon” or by “revis[ing] canonical texts and concepts”
by “[u]nwriting” works like The Tempest or Heart of Darkness,48 the second
of these points having been raised in Culture and Imperialism. Darby
defines “‘resistance literature’” as “texts of cultural affirmation and national
liberation” and rightly asserts that after independence such works were
“mostly directed against the new elites and characteristically [took] the
form of political allegory,”49 particularly in African fiction. By contrast, he
argues that Anglophone Indian fiction was often ambivalent about imperi-
alism rather than necessarily resistant to it. Darby’s view of African litera-
ture supports Jameson’s over-generalized but nonetheless useful argument
that in “Third-World Literature” “the story of the private individual destiny
is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture
and society” and that “third-world national allegories are conscious and
overt,”50 and indeed this the case in much African postcolonial fiction,
notably that of Ngũgı̃. Ramazani analyzes postcolonial poetry in relation to
two of the resistance themes Said identified in Culture and Imperialism: the
need to reclaim the land and the need to establish an independent com-
munal history,51 arguing that postcolonial poets show either a “resistive”
and/or an “affiliative, if still revisionary” relationship to European writing
and demonstrating that many postcolonial writers have incorporated
Western literary techniques into their works, as is also suggested by Marx.52

Varieties of Resistance Writing

The works of Ngũgı̃ demonstrate many of the different types of postcolo-
nial resistance writing. Firstly, there is his political and fictional critique of
colonialism and neocolonialism, which draws heavily on Fanon’s ideas and
which is to be found in Barrel of a Pen (1983), Decolonising the Mind (1986)
and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998), among other works, and in
the novels A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross
(1982) and Wizard of the Crow (2007). Secondly, in his decision to move
from English to Gikuyu in his fiction and to draw heavily on Gikuyu
Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 229
cultural forms in his translations, Ngũgı̃ represents postcolonial resistance
to European languages and literary forms and the concomitant assertion of
the values of the formerly colonized culture, often using traditional oral
narrative forms and/or fantastic realism. Thirdly, in his prison memoir
Detained (1981), Ngũgı̃ reexamines colonial settler culture in Kenya and the
history of Gikuyu resistance to colonial oppression, as well as giving an
account of his own detention. Perhaps the only form of resistance literature
not to be found in Ngũgı̃ is that which focuses on the experiences of racism
and alienation of individuals from former colonies in the Western metro-
polis, often challenging colonial and/or world history, writing which might
be seen as another version of Said’s “voyage in.”
Ngũgı̃’s political writings all demand the African writer’s solidarity
with peasants and the urban poor.53 In Decolonising the Mind Ngũgı̃ also
argues that postcolonial African writers need to write in their own
indigenous languages, to exploit their oral traditions and to express
communal rather than individual politics and desires.54 However, sig-
nificantly, even after declaring that Petals of Blood would be his last novel
in English, he continued to write autobiographical and polemical texts in
English and translated Devil on the Cross and The Wizard of the Crow,
although into an English shot through with Gikuyu verbal patterns and
cultural forms. Decolonising the Mind offers many parallels with Fanon’s
Wretched of the Earth. Like Fanon, Ngũgı̃ emphasizes the potential of the
peasants and workers for resistance and the need for African writers to
reconnect with them lest they become too Europeanized and write “Afro-
European novel[s],” and he follows Fanon in castigating the nationalist
bourgeoisie for its ties with foreign capitalists and its exploitation and
robbery of the masses.55 He also gives an account of the genesis of his
Gikuyu play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) in 1977, its
banning, and its role in his detention and exile.
Ngũgı̃’s novels offer the most consistent examples of postcolonial lit-
erary resistance as versions of national allegory and challenges to colonial
history. For example, General R. in A Grain of Wheat declares: “‘We want a
Kenya built on the heroic tradition of resistance of our people,’”56 and the
novel deals with the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonialism,
rewriting hegemonic accounts of the rebellion and documenting Gikuyu
mythology. Later novels like Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross and Wizard
of the Crow challenge the neocolonial elite’s exploitation and manipulation
of peasants and ordinary people57 and celebrate resistance to it by both men
and women. Both novels include strong women characters – Wanja, in the
first, Wariinga in the second and Nyawira in the third – who show that
230 valerie kennedy
women are, as Ngũgı̃ says in Detained, “the most exploited and oppressed
section of the entire working class” and that they also have “a will to resist
and to struggle” against this.58 Such novels show why Fanon’s The
Wretched of the Earth is a key text of postcolonial resistance. Fanon insists
that political independence often represents no change for the mass of the
formerly colonized population, because “the national bourgeoisie” – the
neocolonial elite, including most intellectuals – is assimilated to Western
values and maintains its contacts with foreign powers and capital, thus
betraying the aspirations of the majority of the people.59 Ngũgı̃’s Devil on
the Cross dramatizes precisely this betrayal.60 Moreover, Petals of Blood,
Devil on the Cross and The Wizard of the Crow exemplify another important
form of postcolonial linguistic resistance: the inclusion of non-English
words and expressions and of folk tales, praise songs and myths from the
culture of the previously colonized people, since they are full of Gikuyu
words, proverbs, songs, poems, riddles and incantations, which dramatize
popular culture and resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism. In
Wizard of the Crow in particular, Ngũgı̃ uses a form of magic realism
that is a departure from the partly allegorical realism of early works, such as
The River Between and Weep Not, Child, and that might be compared to the
different version of magic realism to be found in the works of Salman
Rushdie.61
In Culture and Imperialism, Said discusses Ngũgı̃’s second novel, The
River Between (1965), as a rewriting of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, suggest-
ing “a return to an African Africa,” and he notes that Ngũgı̃ and Tayeb
Salih reexamine “such great topoi of colonial culture as the quest and the
voyage into the unknown” from a postcolonial perspective.62 Said ignores
the resistance to neocolonial injustice, exploitation and repression by
peasants, workers and some intellectuals in A Grain of Wheat (1967),
Petals of Blood (1977) or Devil on the Cross (1982), thus overlooking the
continuity in Ngũgı̃’s work between his call for resistance by African
peasants, workers and writers in Decolonising the Mind and its dramatiza-
tion in the actions of Wanja, Munira, Karega and the lawyer in Petals of
Blood; those of Warīīnga, Mūturi and Gatuīria in Devil on the Cross; and
those of Nyawira and Kamiti in Wizard of the Crow. Neither does Said
register these novels’ use of Gikuyu language and cultural forms or the use
of magic realism in Devil on the Cross. Overall, Said accurately identifies
Ngũgı̃’s debt to Conrad and the significance of the change from English to
Gikuyu, but perhaps the focus on Conrad causes Said to neglect other
important elements of cultural resistance in Ngũgı̃’s writings. What Said
says of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) also applies to Ngũgı̃’s use of
Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 231
magic realism in his later works: like Rushdie’s novel, which Said takes as
an example of “the voyage in,” they attempt to “enter into the discourse of
Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge
marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories.”63 However, in Ngũgı̃’s
case this discursive challenge articulates an explicit call for political resis-
tance, while Rushdie’s magical realism offers oblique political critique
rather than the direct attacks on neocolonialism found in the works of
Ngũgı̃ and other African novelists.64
Salih’s Season of Migration to the North offers an early example of Said’s
“voyage in” or of what Aamir R. Mufti calls the “literature of immigra-
tion,”65 where colonial subjects or their descendants confront metropolitan
racism. However, Salih’s novel is unusual in that its protagonist Mustafa
Sa‘eed exploits sensual Orientalist stereotypes to seduce Western women,
as well as describing the European desire for the Other as a “disease,” while
its unnamed first-person narrator sees his “village at the bend of the Nile”
in Orientalist terms as unchanging, timeless and innocent, although it is
also characterized by sexual license, and he also criticizes neocolonial
abuses of power.66 Later novels by Sam Selvon and Andrea Levy develop
this theme by exploring the experiences of their protagonists in the
metropolis.67

Conclusion
From Orientalism to Culture and Imperialism, Said’s works offered para-
digms for the analysis of literary resistance in postcolonial writing. Culture
and Imperialism outlined some of the main areas of such resistance: the
rewriting of canonical Western texts and the reconﬁguring of canonical
representations of the colonized, the challenge to colonial history, the use
of indigenous literary forms and languages, and alternatives to hegemonic
colonial and neocolonial narratives. As I have suggested, Said’s ideas were
adapted and developed by postcolonial theorists such as Spivak and
Bhabha as well as by a plethora of other writers, so that his work remains
a key starting point for any analysis of postcolonial literary resistance.

Notes
1. Said was not first in the field, but he was the first to have widespread influence.
2. For discussion of the gender and other criticisms, see Valerie Kennedy, Edward
Said: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 30, pp. 37–46,
p. 153 n26.
232 valerie kennedy
3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 7.
4. Said, Orientalism, p. 24.
5. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (Autumn
1985): p. 91, p. 94.
6. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,”
in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 41, p. 43.
7. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” p. 93, pp. 104–105.
8. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 9.
9. Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 254.
10. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 7,
p. 67, p. 17.
11. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Paul A. Bové, “An Interview with Edward W. Said,”
boundary 2 20:1 (Spring 1993): p. 1, p. 2.
12. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. xii.
13. Said, Culture, p. xii.
14. Said, Culture, p. 252.
15. Said, Culture, pp. 268–270, pp. 272–273.
16. Said, Culture, p. 274.
17. Said, Culture, p. 294.
18. Mary Louise Pratt, “Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism: A Symposium,”
Social Text 40 (Fall 1994): p. 7.
19. Said, Culture, p. 252, p. 263.
20. Said, Culture, p. 330.
21. Said, Culture, p. 331; Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance
Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 106.
22. Fanon, The Wretched, p. 102.
23. Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban (1956) is another postcolonial revi-
sion of The Tempest.
24. Said, Culture, p. 257 (original emphasis), p. 260.
25. Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 11, pp. 4–5. See also Aamir R.
Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 115. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of
Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London: Faber and
Faber, 1989), p. 56, and V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now
(London: Minerva, 1991), p. 517, make similar arguments.
26. Boehmer, Empire, p. 27.
27. Boehmer, Empire, pp. 226–229.
28. Said, Culture, p. 226; Boehmer, Empire, pp. 169–170.
29. Said, Culture, 227; Boehmer, Empire, p. 172, p. 175.
30. Philip Darby, The Fiction of Imperialism (London: Cassell, 1998), p. 127,
p. 226.
31. Neil Lazarus, Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press), p. 215, p. 213.
Edward Said & Resistance in Colonial & Postcolonial Literatures 233
32. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of
Imperialism,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), p. 262.
33. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London: Routledge, 1992), p. 9.
34. Said, Culture, p. 73.
35. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 220,
p. 221, p. 297, p. 307.
36. See Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 11, p. 103.
37. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” p. 272.
38. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,”
The Massachusetts Review 57:1 (2016): p. 15, p. 21, p. 22, p. 19, p. 20,
39. Said, Culture, p. 91, p. 200.
40. Said, Culture, p. 335.
41. Said, Culture, p. 26, p. 27.
42. Said, Culture, p. 31, p. 33.
43. Said, Culture, p. 33.
44. Said, Culture, p. 199.
45. Said, Culture, p. 33; original emphasis.
46. Said, Culture, p. 280; Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York:
Methuen, 1987), p. xx, pp. 28–29, p. 78.
47. Harlow, Resistance Literature, p. 28.
48. John Marx, “Postcolonial Literature and the Western Literary Canon,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 83; original emphases.
49. Darby, The Fiction of Imperialism, pp. 27–28.
50. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986): p. 69, p. 80; original emphases.
51. Jahan Ramazani, “Edward Said and the Poetry of Decolonization,” in Edward
Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, eds. Adel Iskandar and
Haken Rustom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 161.
52. Ramazani, “Edward Said,” p. 165; Marx, “Postcolonial Literature,” pp. 88–92.
53. Other examples are Amilcar Cabral’s “National Liberation and Culture” and
Arundhati Roy’s denunciations of Indian state repression. For the latter see
Mufti, Forget English!, p. 188.
54. Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 80 (Oxford: James Currey,
2005), pp. 29–30. Writers like Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris,
Derek Walcott and Chinweizu et al. also call for the use of indigenous forms
and types of English.
55. Ngũgı̃, Decolonising the Mind, p. 2, p. 29, p. 70, pp. 81–82.
56. Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 217. See
also Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), V. S. Reid’s New Day (1949) and
Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988).
57. Some works among many critiquing neocolonialism are Naipaul’s A Bend in
the River (1979), Kofi Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother (1971), and Wole
234 valerie kennedy
Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1972) and his plays A
Dance of the Forests (1960), Kongi’s Harvest (1964) and Madmen and Specialists
(1970).
58. Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, Detained (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 10.
59. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 152.
60. Other examples of such fiction are Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet
Born (1968), Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) and Nuruddin Farah’s
trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1979, 1981, 1983).
61. This technique of using non-English words also characterizes Achebe’s novels,
Farah’s trilogy and Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother (1971). Indian examples
are Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses
(1988); Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008); and Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long
Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995) and Family Matters (2002).
62. Said, Culture, p. 255, p. 34.
63. Said, Culture, p. 260.
64. The same is true of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988), An Antique
Land (1992), The Glass Palace (2000) and the Ibis Trilogy (2008, 2011, 2015) or
Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man (1991).
65. The term is adapted from Mufti’s phrase “novel of immigration”; see Forget
English!, p. 168.
66. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (London: Heinemann, 1991),
p. 33, p. 1.
67. See Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1999)
and Small Island (2004), as well as Buchi Emecheta’s In the Ditch (1972) and
Second-Class Citizen (1974), Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and Mohsin
Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).
chapter 13

Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved

of Racism?
Andrew C. Long

Aijaz Ahmad’s chapter “Orientalism and After,” collected in his 1992 book
In Theory, has proved to be one of the most thorough and lasting critiques
of a large span of Edward Said’s work, ranging from The Question of
Palestine to Culture and Imperialism. Ahmad’s criticism of Said’s work is
informed, incisive and biting, but it is his comments on Said’s literary
criticism which suggest that the latter absolved Joseph Conrad, E. M.
Forster and other cosmopolitan modern writers of racism even as he was
critical of so many others. Of course, Said’s work is not racist by associa-
tion, as most of his writing after Orientalism was directed toward the
scrutiny and exposure of racism and colonialism, in canonical literary
texts and especially in representations of the Arab and Muslim world. So,
in this instance the cosmopolitan writer is not the critic Edward Said but
rather the cosmopolitan intellectual, a worldly ﬁgure who thinks and writes
from the borders of national ideology, a detached critic. In particular, it is
Said’s sustained engagement with the work of Joseph Conrad, and espe-
cially his 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, which we must reconsider in order
to answer Ahmad’s charge against Said and to understand why so many
scholars defend Conrad’s novella. Indeed, Said never fully answered
Chinua Achebe’s denunciation of the novelist as a “thoroughgoing racist,”1
and his reluctance, I argue, is rooted in his intellectual formation in Cold
War literary and cultural criticism, or what I call a Cold War cultural
critique, which possibly accounts for the contradictions in his positions
that so exasperate Ahmad. The problem, then, lies with the inﬂuence of
Lionel Trilling and Clement Greenberg on Said, and less so with Michel
Foucault and Antonio Gramsci.
To this last end, I have paired Said’s analysis of Heart of Darkness with
his comments on Albert Camus’ short novel L’Étranger (The Stranger) in
order to explore how the Cold War cultural critique works in both novels
and to show the difference in treatment by Said, as both concern

235
236 andrew c. long
colonialism, racism and liberal Western values and both are canonical
modern texts. The two novels complement each other – as a matter of
difference with regard to racism, the cosmopolitan writer and Said’s
literary criticism. While the racism of Heart of Darkness is obvious, The
Stranger is more difﬁcult to read as a racist text, and it is only with Said’s
reading practice, as he elaborates in Orientalism and Culture and
Imperialism, that we might understand how this vaunted novel of
Western consciousness is in fact an insidious text of liberal settler
consciousness.
Moreover, and contrary to Ahmad’s distinction between Said’s literary
and political work, the latter’s reading practice is always evident in his
critical approach in his post-Orientalism writing, whether to novels or
Palestine, and in his essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims”
we see the methodology of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism at
work. His reading practice here is linked to standpoint, a term or herme-
neutic with which we might reassess and press his idea of the contrapuntal
reading as we reconsider Said’s preference for canonical texts and cosmo-
politan writers – including Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, whom Said
considers ﬁrst-world writers – at the expense of third-world writers. I will
develop this last point with reference to the Caribbean novelist Caryl
Phillips’ interview with Chinua Achebe and to the Algerian writer Kamel
Daoud’s recent novel The Meursault Investigation, which is an answer to
the cosmopolitan Albert Camus’ The Stranger, thus the legacy of French
colonialism from the standpoint of an Algerian.

Ahmad on Said
In “Orientalism and After,” Ahmad makes it clear that he admires Said’s
writing about Palestine and his advocacy for the Palestinian cause,
though it is due to his solidarity that he feels obligated to criticize
Orientalism and his literary criticism.2 The larger part of Ahmad’s chapter
on Orientalism is dedicated to a critique of the canonical and transhisto-
rical sweep of Said’s book and Said’s commitment to the European
tradition of comparative literature, even as he seeks to debunk it.
Ahmad also criticizes Said’s use of the work of Michel Foucault, as,
while Said remains an avowed humanist, Foucault’s project was entirely
opposed to the institutions of the Enlightenment and Western human-
ism. Similarly, Said’s references to Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs and
other communist writers resonate with the anti-Marxism in American
academia during the 1980s. This anti-Marxist tendency in Said’s work is
Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? 237
related to his championing of third-world intellectuals, who, Ahmad tells
us, are from their respective national elites and upper classes and whose
work is devoid of class analysis with regard to third-world literature. As
for third-world literary texts, while Ahmad admires Said’s close readings
of the Western literary canon, he pays scant attention to the work of
third-world writers, and when he does comment on third-world writers,
such as Ngũgı̃, Ahmad points out that he misrepresents their work. It is
especially exasperating for Ahmad that Said champions Salman Rushdie,
a writer long based in Britain. Without supporting the fatwa, Ahmad
points out that Rushdie writes for an elite Anglophone audience, not his
fellow working-class Britons of South Asian ancestry.

Achebe and the Defense of Conrad

It is a curious omission, but Ahmad does not mention Chinua Achebe in
his criticism of Said’s valorization of the cosmopolitan intellectual. This
omission is notable given the acclaimed Nigerian novelist’s Chancellor’s
Lecture of 1975, “An Image of Africa,” which was published in 1977 in the
Massachusetts Review. Even today, Achebe’s essay remains a devastating
critique of Conrad and his novella for the racist language and caricatures,
the dehumanizing portrait of Africa and Africans which it features, and its
prominent place as “permanent literature.” Also notable is that Achebe’s
reading of Heart of Darkness is contrapuntal, as Africa is a site for Europe’s
metaphysical crises and a place to stage its “comforting myths,” as well as a
convenient source for the “primitive” art with which European modernism
will resuscitate itself. Achebe anticipates the arguments of the novel’s
defenders – that Marlow is the narrator of a framed tale which is narrated
by another unnamed narrator – and points out that there must be more to
this distancing machination, Conrad’s cordon sanitaire. The strongest parts
of his argument, however, concern the representation of Africans in Heart
of Darkness and the racist language of the text. Achebe’s recitation of
references to “howling” and “rolling eyes,” “stamping” feet and cannibals
is a repellant experience, while Africans are “ugly” and little more than
racist caricatures.3 There is the fireman, who, though “an improved speci-
men,” is nonetheless a “parody in breeches” who is out of place on board
the ship. And there is Kurtz’s African mistress, “savage and superb, wild-
eyed and magnificent,” like so many representations of non-white women
in Western literature.4
There is too the repeated use of a racist epithet – “nigger” – which today
we refer to as “the n-word.” Achebe points out what should be obvious,
238 andrew c. long
that Conrad seemed to like this epithet, as he used it so frequently in his
fiction, including its prominent place in the title of a celebrated short story.
As Achebe states directly, “I am talking about a story in which the very
humanity of black people is called into question.”5 The n-word was
recognized as an ugly epithet in Conrad’s time, and his friend Robert
Cunninghame Graham denounced its use in terms close to those of
Achebe.
Orientalism is a book that is in spirit, if not word, supportive of Achebe’s
criticism of the legacy of colonialism and racism in American and
European literary criticism.6 Yet, as noted earlier, Said never directly
elaborates his rejection of Achebe’s critique, which, given his own position,
should be important. Instead there is an extended list of scholars who have
defended Conrad, such as Cedric Watts, an eminent Conrad scholar, who
mounted an early defense in “‘A Bloody Racist’: About Achebe’s View of
Conrad.”7 For Watts, Conrad is a “friend” of Africa while Achebe simply
misinterprets Conrad’s text. Indeed, rather than making “comforting
myths,” Heart of Darkness, for Watts, is a debunking of those same
myths. Similarly, Achebe’s comments on the African figures are incorrect,
Watts argues, as, to the contrary, the African characters are “happy” and
“vital” by comparison with the colonial characters whom Marlow
describes. As for the n-word, Watts contextualizes and displaces, stating
that Conrad was simply a man of his time, with typical prejudices.
However – and notable here – it is Achebe’s conflation of Conrad with
Albert Schweitzer, and his condemnation of the latter’s brand of mission-
ary liberalism, which bothers Watts.
There are many other Conrad scholars who defended the novelist and
the novel, including Hunt Hawkins and his nuanced approach in
“Conrad’s Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness,” where he argues
it is a reductive reading to over-emphasize race and the novel (and nove-
list).8 On the other hand, in his book Envisioning Africa: Racism and
Imperialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Peter Firchow offers a legalistic
defense of the writer and text, with the kind of fine definition of words in
textual context, such as “ugly” and “black,” more befitting a criminal
defense lawyer than a literary scholar.9 Moderating the debate in his 1985
essay “Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism,”10
Patrick Brantlinger states that much in the novella is drawn from “the
repertoire of Victorian imperialism and racism that painted an entire
continent dark.”11 Moreover, Brantlinger notes, there is no mention of
the 1891 to 1894 Belgian war with Arab slave traders and the related
mutilation of corpses in Conrad’s novella. This omission allows for
Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? 239
Conrad’s reference to “unspeakable rites” to be cast as African, not as part
of a war between two non-African parties.
The problem today is not limited to critical valuation and a scholarly
dispute but rather concerns the place of Conrad’s novella in public space,
specifically the classroom. Should the novella be taught at all, and, if so, in
what sort of pedagogical context? In his curiously titled essay “Jungle
Fever,” which appeared in a 1995 issue of the New Yorker, David Denby
audited a class discussion of the novella at Columbia University.12 When
Denby eventually addresses race and Achebe’s and Said’s criticism of the
novella, he denounces both for their political reading, an interpretation
which is sufficiently “angry to ignore fictional strategies, palpable anguish,
and the many differences between Conrad’s eighteen nineties conscious-
ness of race and our own.”13 For Denby, Achebe and Said have politicized
great art and failed to recognize aesthetic accomplishment.
Lennard Davis wrote a very different article about race, Conrad’s novella
and the classroom for the Chronicle Review.14 It is a short article, but contrary
to Denby he addresses the obvious, the racist language and imagery of the
novella, and recounts distressing teaching experiences as two of his students,
both women of African ancestry, found the novella offensive. Their outrage
at its racist features shocked Davis, given his own thirty-year experience with
the novella. During high school he was taught that it was a modern
existentialist classic; later, in college at Columbia University, in a class with
Edward Said, that it was a critique of empire and colonialism.
For Davis, Heart of Darkness is still a complex and provocative text,
though in his final comments he wonders when and how he might teach it
again. His position is probably the most representative of teachers and
scholars today, having moved far from the defenders of the novella and
their textual and biography-based arguments. The more recent group of
readers and teachers, like Davis, are influenced by Said and hold onto the
novel as a complicated text about imperialism and racism; they thereby
recognize its controversial features, though perhaps following Said some
still insist on the irony and distancing of the framed tale form. Davis, on
the other hand, nonetheless values the text for the way its aesthetic qualities
intertwine with the political and historical issues in a disturbing, powerful
and yet useful way, albeit suitable only for a special teaching context.

Africa
So, specifically, what does Said tell us about Joseph Conrad and his work?
Indeed, Joseph Conrad figured largely in Edward Said’s career, beginning
240 andrew c. long
with his first book, Joseph Conrad and his Fiction of Autobiography, and
Conrad’s texts – ranging from Lord Jim and Nostromo to The Secret Agent
and Almayer’s Folly – featured in Said’s work.15 Yet it is Heart of Darkness,
the most famous and troubling example of Conrad’s fiction, to which Said
returned, again and again. Aptly, Heart of Darkness is mentioned many
times in his first book and is discussed at length in the chapter “Past and
Present,” while “Conrad: Presentation of Narrative” appeared in The
World the Text and the Critic16 and “Conrad and Nietzsche” was included
in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.17 Interestingly Conrad is only
mentioned in passing in Orientalism, and the most significant reference
is a passage from Heart of Darkness that appears as the epigraph for chapter
3, “Orientalism Now,” where Said writes about racism and Orientalism in
modernity. Heart of Darkness is central in “Two Visions in Heart of
Darkness,” in Culture and Imperialism, where Said develops his critical
terms, the contrapuntal and the “voyage in.”18 A contrapuntal reading,
as Said elaborates with reference to Mansfield Park and, notably, The
Stranger, recognizes the oppositions – the implicit/explicit and the
absent/present – that underpin a text, for the excluded is as constitutive
as that which is present.19 The “voyage in” of the third-world character into
the West provides a context where the contrapuntal is realized as the
critical consciousness of the third-world intellectual. For Said this is a
privileged critical stance of detachment and irony, a stance which has a
history, for this cosmopolitan or third-world intellectual is from “there”
but “here,” yet, we must add, finally from nowhere, as with the Mustafa
Sa‘eed in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.20
Again, Heart of Darkness is mentioned many times in Joseph Conrad and
his Fiction of Autobiography and discussed at length in one chapter, “The
Past and Present.” As the title suggests, this chapter addresses the way the
present is folded back into the past, or even “engulfs” the present, while the
narrative dissolves into passages of reflection. The form of Heart of
Darkness, as a journey where Kurtz functions as a point d’appui, is also
related, as the latter, in contrast to Marlow, is a figure of action “joined” to
thought. Said comments that this dilemma, grounded in Conrad’s narra-
tive, is an “accurate representation in fiction of the historic predicament of
mind-tortured modern Europe.”21 Clearly, Said’s insights here are firmly
grounded in the metaphysical and aesthetic values of the 1960s and the
Cold War, which we shall explore shortly. In “Conrad: Presentation of
Narrative,” many of these same points are picked up again, clearly with the
influence of literary trends of the time, especially phenomenology and
deconstruction, as Said focuses on the way Conrad’s texts are presented as
Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? 241
oral narratives rendered visible through the written word. Writing, as Said
reads Conrad and Heart of Darkness, is an attempt to transcend absence,
lost utterances, and is a transcription of actions taken. Conrad’s writing,
Said concludes finally, confirms his authorship, which runs contrary to his
previous reading of Heart of Darkness and of the distance between the
author, the narrator and Kurtz. And racism.
There is a different emphasis in “Conrad and Nietzsche,” for, though
published earlier, here Said moved away from his early formalist emphasis
on narrative and sought to link the form, the narrative form of Conrad’s
fiction, to Africa and empire. Said claims, for example, that in Heart of
Darkness Conrad’s narrative
[p]ries the habitual from its normal surroundings and applies it to new ones,
which in turn must be apprehended and described by a language telling us
that things are not so different after all: must we not remember that here is
another one of Marlow’s “inconclusive experiences,” that “this also was one
of the dark places of the earth,” and so on?22
It is only in his well-known chapter of Culture and Imperialism “Two
Visions in Heart of Darkness” that Said finally discusses the colonial and
racial references and textual features of this novella. Said argues that
current debates on the former colonies are caught between a position
which bemoans the withdrawal and loss of empire (the colonies were better
off back then . . .) and a position which blames the contemporary mis-
fortunes and suffering of postcolonial countries on the legacy of European
oppression. Naipaul represents the first position, and Said’s point is
apparent, I argue, in the former’s uncritical riff on Heart of Darkness,
complete with its racist imagery, and caricature of late twentieth-century
African nationalist politics in A Bend in the River. While Said does not offer
an example – an author or text – of the “blame Europe” position, Culture
and Imperialism sets up Rushdie as a kind of man in the middle, the
intellectual who writes of what he calls “interdependent histories,” taking
a position both within and without, either Orwell’s “whale” or the dis-
course of colonialism and its legacy.23 Conrad, for Said, is also within and
without, as an exilic figure in his life story and his fiction and in his
aesthetic. Taking us back to his earlier work on the novelist, Said claims
that while Conrad believed that Africa was incapable of independence (p.
30), the ironic distance that Conrad takes in the novel, through the
narrative form of a “self-consciously circular narrative” (p. 28) and the
language of the text, makes him a critic of “the empire of business” (p. 23)
and colonialism. As Said reads Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s story telling
242 andrew c. long
“accentuates” the “discrepancy between the official ‘idea’ of empire and the
remarkably disorienting actuality of Africa” (p. 29). Here, perhaps, the
early aesthetic of distance and irony is the only way to keep Said’s contra-
puntal reading (with history) from leading us to conclude that the novella
is racist propaganda.
It is only in passing in a later chapter that Said defends Conrad
against Achebe’s charge, claiming the latter does not consider the
limitations of Conrad’s worldview – and aesthetic, we might
assume – given the limitations of the novel form. Said continues to
praise Achebe for his own reproduction of the form of Heart of
Darkness as a form of “writing back” to Europe (p. 76, p. 274) and
for the writer’s point that Europe establishes Western reasons, based
in a questionable claim to universality, a claim which excludes the
formerly colonized world even as it purports otherwise (p. 277). Said
even concedes that Marlow’s tale is about “restoring Africa to
European hegemony” (p. 164), a point which does not entirely under-
mine his earlier claim for Conrad’s “ironic distance” (p. 25), though it
suggests that this aspect of his reading of Conrad and his novella is,
perhaps, tenuous.

Algeria
Algeria figures prominently in Edward Said’s work, as with his inter-
view/essay on Gillo Pontecorvo and The Battle of Algiers and his essay
on the work of Frantz Fanon, as well as the many references to Fanon
found throughout Said’s oeuvre. And then there is Said’s chapter in
Culture and Imperialism on Albert Camus, the pied noir writer and
intellectual who attained near universal status and recognition well
beyond the streets of Belcourt and Oran. Said’s sustained interest in
Algeria and its war of independence is understandable as he was a
young man and a Palestinian during the war years, and the victory of
the Front de libération nationale (FLN) excited and energized Arab
nationalist and similar liberation movements across North Africa and
the Middle East.
Albert Camus, though a pied noir settler, opposed both the violence of
the state and the insurrectionary violence, and through the 1950s until 1958
he wrote and negotiated with all parties except the FLN for a peaceful
resolution to the Algerian conflict, albeit without supporting indepen-
dence. Yet we remember Albert Camus today as the author of the novel
L’Étranger, or The Stranger, which turns on the murder of “an Arab” on the
Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? 243
beach of Algiers by one Meursault, a French citizen of Algeria, a pied noir.
Here is Meursault’s account of the murder:
The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm.
And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my sweat
and the clinging veil of light. I knew I’d shattered the balance of the day, the
spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four
shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each
successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.24
The murdered “Arab” is never named, while the passage describing his
death – though in English translation – reads like an account from a pulp
crime novel such as a shooting by Raymond Chandler’s Marlow. The
victim, who earlier was described as a lizard on the beach, is now only an
“inert body” – yet, this novel, like Heart of Darkness, is part of the
“permanent literature” and valorized by experts as a text of universal values.
Two figures on the European cultural left, Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland
Barthes, were early champions of Camus and The Stranger. Said, however,
only mentions Barthes in passing and turns instead to Algerian intellec-
tuals, such as H’sen Derdour, and later Abdullah Laroui (notably, omitting
Mouloud Feraoun, Camus’ Kabyle Algerian interlocutor), as well as the
Irish writer and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien. The latter wrote a
sharply critical book, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa, in which he linked
the murder of an “Arab” to colonial racism and the racist Algerian settler
state. O’Brien contests the defense of Camus’ work and politics and
especially Germaine Bree’s characterization of racial relations between
Arabs and Kabyles and their working-class settler pied noir neighbors as
“impervious to racial barriers.”25 Furthermore, O’Brien argues that Camus’
geographic imaginary was always firmly caught within the terms of a
Eurocentric and colonial worldview, especially his notion of the
Mediterranean, and so The Stranger must be read within its colonial
context. For O’Brien, as Said observes, Camus was a “moral man in an
immoral situation,” a position which preserves his humanist reputation
and resonates with Said’s comments on Conrad and his novella.26
Camus, as Said reads his work, is not an apologist for French colonial-
ism, nor is he simply naive or an idealist, caught between the settler and
FLN extremes. Rather, the thrust of Said’s critique of Camus in Culture
and Imperialism concerns the importance of Camus’ Algerian location for
several important works, including The Stranger, and the relationship
between Camus’ Algerian location – the land, the sea and the sun – and
his “universal” themes and philosophy, as with Conrad’s Africa. Indeed,
244 andrew c. long
Said argues for three methodological points with which he will read
Camus’ work, the first of which is the location, while the second is the
historical context – the anticolonial war – and the third concerns the
French, not Algerian, literary context for the writer’s Algerian texts. Said
argues that Camus’ Algerian landscape includes only unnamed Arabs, such
as the one Meursault murders on the beach, and is inseparable from his
appeal to universal themes.
Clearly there is much that Said does not address directly in Camus’
novel, especially the murder of an “Arab,” though his mention of the
absence of an Algerian literary context is relevant here. In Imperial
Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria, Patricia M.
E. Lorcin offers a sustained analysis of how race figured into Algerian
government, justice and everyday life from the 1830s to the late twentieth
century.27 Her particular focus is the Kabyle Myth, which the French
colonizers developed in literary, ethnographic and anthropological texts,
whereby the Kabyle was identified as the superior native. That is, while the
Arab indigene was lazy, criminal, a religious fanatic and otherwise suspect,
the Kabyle was a reliable worker and open to training and education. Later
in her book Lorcin offers a brief overview of the popular novels such as
Ferdinand Duchene’s Kamir, which is about an educated Arab woman,
Kamir, and her ill-fated relationship with a settler – she commits suicide –
and the novel’s message: that is, the “impossibility of relationships between
indigene and colon.”28 The conjunction of melodrama and interracial sex
is far from unusual and is a staple of popular culture and a racist society.
Said is clear, then, that Camus’ work is linked to colonial settler politics,
and he cites a well-known passage from Camus’ Algerian Chronicles where,
following his translation, Camus proclaims that “[t]here has never yet been
an Algerian nation” and that “[t]he French of Algeria are also natives, in the
strong sense of the word.”29 Said interprets this passage as an example of the
“blankness and absence of background”30 that makes so much of Camus’
work viable, just as for Jane Austen or George Eliot the colonies were a
largely absent but constitutive background – or for Zionist ideology, where
Palestine was an empty unpopulated land. Camus, following Said’s reading,
is oblivious to the contradictions of his words, aesthetic, politics and world-
view. Moreover, as a writer he is interesting for Said insofar as he replicates
the ideology and self-representation of French Algeria, the social and poli-
tical imaginary of French colonialism. While Said recognizes the way racism
and colonialism work in Camus’ text, in the absences and across the Algerian
landscape, he does not condemn or denounce the writer in the strong terms
that O’Brien used earlier. Said’s reluctance to denounce this novel, or any
Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? 245
literary text, is important, and we will address it shortly as an aspect of his
critical method, as a reading practice and as a valuation of literature as such.

The Cold War Cultural Critique

Simply put, Said’s valuation of Joseph Conrad and many other cosmopo-
litan writers is rooted in what I call a Cold War cultural critique, albeit with
some aspects inverted. Consider, first, that Said’s intellectual formation, as
a graduate student and later as a professor at Columbia University, was
decisively mediated by the Cold War literary scholars in his milieu. The
values of these scholars, such as anticommunism, the touting of American
notions of democracy and freedom, and liberalism, are realized in a cultural
program which espouses and embodies these same values, against commu-
nist tyranny and the conformism of mass culture. The key terms these
scholars use are detachment (as a productive form of alienation) and the
aesthetic of detachment, irony, all of which resonate with Said’s inversion
for the stance of the cosmopolitan intellectual.31
In representative essays by two Cold War writers, the literary critic and
scholar (and Said’s former colleague at Columbia University) Lionel
Trilling and the art critic Clement Greenberg, we find the aesthetic of
detachment and irony, in the same terms by which both Kurtz and
Meursault are absolved and valorized. Thus, in Sincerity and Authenticity,
Lionel Trilling writes that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a patrician critique
of European modernity and “contains in sum the whole radical critique of
European civilization that has been made by literature in the years since its
publication.”32 Conrad’s novella, and great art, is not political, and Kurtz,
for Trilling, is not a political figure, for his struggle is not about the fantasy
of “Africa” and going native but an internal existential struggle and
alienation. Trilling’s artist is an alienated man, a detached man, who
practices a detached aesthetic, irony.
Like Trilling, Clement Greenberg, the former’s colleague at Partisan
Review, in “The Avante-garde and Kitsch” compares the debased and mass-
produced ersatz culture of modernity, kitsch, to great art, the avant-garde.
The modern artist, for Greenberg, is detached from the routines and
comforts of kitsch and expresses himself otherwise. The masses, he
laments, prefer the kitsch poetry of Tin Pan Alley to the work of T. S.
Eliot, and the work of a kitsch artist, Repin, is preferred to the cubism of
Picasso. While kitsch is mass-produced, for the masses, avant-garde art is
detached, contemplative and about and for itself, thus the “imitation of
246 andrew c. long
imitating.” By contrast, kitsch is the art of demagogy: “Kitsch keeps a
dictator in closer contact with the ‘soul’ of the people.”33
In addition to the insight into the hold that the Cold War cultural critique
exerts on Said’s literary criticism – that is, his preference for the canonical and,
perhaps, elitist, as well as the inverted link between, say, the cosmopolitan
intellectual and the limits of the contrapuntal – there remains the problem of
the moral mission. The anticommunism, elitism and values of the Cold War
cultural critique are finally a function – moralizing – of a moral purpose and
cause. Clearly, as we see in Said’s later comments on Conrad and his novella,
he firmly rejects the moral aspect of the Cold War critique, which also explains
his refusal of a moral critique of Conrad as a racist. Ironically, then, the tone of
Ahmad’s criticism of Said marks the left return of the moral critique.

Standpoint of the Cannibal and the “Arab”

After Orientalism, and against the “apolitical” liberalism of the Cold
War cultural critique, Said increasingly asserts the importance of
political critique, coalescing in his ideas of the contrapuntal and,
especially, standpoint. In “Zionism from the Standpoint of its
Victims,” Said starts his chapter commenting on “[t]he tendency to
view ideas as pertaining only to a world of abstractions”: a view, or
standpoint, which requires the obliteration of reality.34 A bit later, he
adds, “To the Palestinian, for whom Zionism was somebody else’s
idea, imported into Palestine and for which in a very concrete way he
or she was made to pay and suffer, these forgotten things about
Zionism are the very things that are centrally important” (p. 57).
For Said, then, the Zionist narrative, as with so many other nation-
alist narratives, is not without counter-narratives, while the Zionist
narrative is “premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional
absence of ‘native’ people in Palestine.”35 It is notable at this juncture
that Said’s position on Heart of Darkness has shifted from the textu-
alism and Cold War terms of his first book, and he returns to the
novella in this essay to make his point.
Such political analysis is familiar now, though it is clearly derived from
Said’s literary criticism – that is, from the way he reads and values
literature, first in Orientalism and later in Culture and Imperialism. In
“Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French” (in Orientalism), for exam-
ple, Said states that the “unbroken patch of British-held territory, from the
Mediterranean to India” was known and managed as a matter of “political
will, political management, political definition” (p. 169). Even travel
Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? 247
literature is not innocent but a key aspect of hegemony and rule through a
process of textual inclusion and exclusion.
Later, in Culture and Imperialism, as Ahmad notes, Said includes several
close readings of literary texts and Verdi’s Aida. In the following passage
Said explains how he reads Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as a colonial text,
though there are few direct references to the colonial backdrop, the family
plantation on Antigua and slave labor. To the contrary, Said tells us how
we are to read for “what is there or not there”36 and why we read this way.
Again, literature, for Said, is more than entertainment in a superficial or
superstructural sense; rather, it is what makes empires cohere and function,
given what is said and unsaid about race and slavery.
In a 2003 interview with Chinua Achebe, published in The Guardian
newspaper, the novelist Caryl Phillips revisited the former’s comments on
Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness.37 In response to Phillips’ questions,
Achebe repeats many of the points from his earlier lecture and essay.
Though Achebe does not return to question the place of the novella in
the canon of “permanent literature,” he does contest its artistic merit, for,
he asks, how can such a racist text which dehumanizes others be considered
great art? Phillips, himself of African descent, is still unconvinced at this
juncture and asks, “Are we to throw all racists out of the canon?” Yet by the
end of the interview Phillips understands Achebe’s position, the position of
an African:
Achebe is right; to the African reader the price of Conrad’s eloquent
denunciation of colonisation is the recycling of racist notions of the
“dark” continent and her people. Those of us who are not from Africa
may be prepared to pay this price, but this price is far too high for Achebe.38
Phillips’ concluding position on Heart of Darkness is, clearly, contrary to
Said’s reading of the novella. Though Said concedes that Conrad’s racism
limits the scope of his anti-imperialist stance in Heart of Darkness, it is only
in his work on Palestine, in “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,”
that we find a position close to Phillips and a position which is respectful,
rigorous and appropriate for our reading of the novel today, at least in the
context of an ever-diverse polity.
In a different and important sense, the contrapuntal dialogue between
the “Arab” and Camus – Algeria and France – is updated in The Meursault
Investigation, a recent novel by Kamel Daoud, who writes about the
murder of Camus’ “Arab” from the standpoint of his living Arab brother,
Harun.39 The novel is a literary engagement with Camus that takes place in
a seedy bar in Oran; thus, it is a kind of picaresque text told by an unnamed
248 andrew c. long
person who is taking notes for another text, a novel or biography of the
dead brother. Daoud’s novel combines elements of the eighteenth-century
novel, sprinkled with references to Defoe’s colonialist hero, Robinson
Crusoe, and the murder of his Friday/“Arab”:
My brother’s name was Musa. He had a name. But he’ll remain “the Arab”
forever. The last on the list, excluded from the inventory that Crusoe of
yours made. Strange isn’t it? For centuries, the settler increases his fortune,
giving names to whatever he appropriates and taking them away from
whatever makes him feel uncomfortable. If he calls my brother “the
Arab,” it’s so he can kill him the way one kills time, by strolling around
aimlessly.40
Harun tells his interlocutor that “the Arab” is referenced twenty-five times
in Camus’ novel, a casual use of – in context – a racist epithet: “Arab. I
never felt Arab, you know. Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists
in the white man’s eyes.”41
The Meursault Investigation is contrapuntal but a work in its own right.
As though mimicking the modernist faulty narrator, our barroom story-
teller is naive, even abject, belittled by his angry and also abject mother,
with whom he lives and whose directions for revenge he follows. The
revenge scene is like much else in the novel, anticlimactic, though the
Frenchman has a name, Joseph Larquais, who was a member of his
mother’s employer’s family whom she resented. The narrator and his
mother bury Joseph Larquais under a tree, in July 1962, only days after
Algerian independence. Harun is later arrested and quickly released by the
authorities, with the rebuke that he – who was not an FLN militant
– should have killed the pied noir earlier, prior to independence, and
then it would have been a just murder. This is the Algerian absurd, and,
answering Camus, Harun faces a non-trial for not fighting in the war and
not murdering a settler on time. This is contrapuntal, as, for Daoud, it is
more complicated than “writing back.” As Harun asks, how can an
Algerian counter Western writers, and, especially here, his illiterate griev-
ing mother, for “[h]ow can you tell the world about that when you don’t
know how to write books?”42

Absolution No and Yes

In answer to the question of whether the cosmopolitan writer can be
absolved of racism, from the perspective of Edward Said’s literary criticism,
and from a progressive position today, No! and Yes! Following the work of
Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? 249
Said, and contrary to the insinuations of Ahmad, literary texts are racist
that use racist language, imagery and espouse racist ideas and must be
called out as such. While Said does not denounce Conrad or Camus, or
even Kipling, he does not endorse their racist writing nor the complicity
between their work and racist oppression, whether in Antigua, the Belgian
Congo or French Algeria. Said’s position here is not absolution in any
sense, given the purpose of his work and career from Orientalism forward.
Nor, today, can these writers be absolved of their viewpoints. It is hard to
imagine a classroom in the United States today where one might teach
Heart of Darkness in the aesthetic terms – irony, detachment, existential,
écriture blanche – in which it was championed for so many years. Indeed,
today one might rightly refer to these previous terms as an aestheticization
of politics.
And yet, yes, we should not jettison these texts, at least according
to Said’s valuation of literature in Orientalism and in Culture and
Imperialism, as a textualization of social relations and the human imagin-
ary. And with this valuation we can read – and teach in the appropriate
context – contrapuntally even the most racist poems and novels, not as an
affirmation of racism or sexism but rather as a critical analysis of how the
questionable worldview, and hegemony, works in a given text. Moreover,
we should press Said’s contrapuntal further and accept Ahmad’s points
about class and elitism, to ensure that Algerians such as Harun’s
mother – illiterate and abject – and the Sudanese intellectual Mustafa
Sa‘eed, or Caryl Phillips’ returning intellectual, Bertram Francis, in A State
of Independence are fully recognized with their limitations and contra-
dictions – class – revealed. The Cold War cultural critique and some
aspects of postcolonial criticism today, counterintuitively, share a moral
agenda that blocks this sort of complicated contrapuntal reading. For the
Cold War, and the influence thereof on Said, the moralism of anti-
communism, and the valorization of the artist as an exception outside
the masses and mass culture, leads to the aestheticization of politics of
Greenberg, Trilling or F. R. Leavis. For postcolonialism, the problem, as
with Ahmad’s reading of Said’s literary criticism, is that the denunciation
of racist texts and writers only leads to a moralizing dead-end, which is also,
finally, an aestheticization of politics. The contrapuntal, I believe, is
derived from the dialectical tradition of the Frankfurt School, and the
work of Georg Lukacs, and all engaged fascism and fascist thought in their
critical practice. In our time, in the United States and in Europe, with the
legacy of slavery and the legacy of the Algerian war in mind and racist
political movements on the rise, this approach is an imperative.
250 andrew c. long
Notes
1. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness,” in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough
(New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1988), p. 257.
2. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992),
pp. 159–160.
3. See Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” pp. 253–254.
4. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York:
Norton Critical Editions, 1988), p. 60.
5. See Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” p. 259.
6. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).
7. Cedric Watts, “‘A Bloody Racist’: About Achebe’s View of Conrad,” The
Yearbook of English Studies 1 (1983): pp. 196–209.
8. Hunt Hawkins, “The Issue of Racism in Heart of Darkness,” Conradiana 14:3
(1982): pp. 163–171.
9. Peter Edgerly Firchow. Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999).
10. Patrick Brantlinger, “Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or
Impressionism?,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 27:4
(1985): pp. 363–385.
11. Brantlinger, “Heart of Darkness,” p. 371.
12. David Denby, “Jungle Fever,” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A
Casebook, ed. Gene Moore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.
243–266.
13. Denby, p. 257.
14. Lennard J. Davis, “The Value of Teaching From a Racist Classic,” The
Chronicle Review 52:37 (May 9, 2006): p. B9.
15. Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).
16. Edward Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983).
17. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000).
18. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994).
19. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 66–67.
20. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies
(Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997).
21. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, p. 113.
22. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, p. 81.
23. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 19–21.
24. Albert Camus, The Stranger, pp. 38–39.
25. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa (New York: Viking,
1970), p. 6.
26. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 174.
Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism? 251
27. Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in
Colonial Algeria (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995).
28. Lorcin, Imperial Identities, p. 219.
29. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 179.
30. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 179.
31. My position here is largely derived from Lary May’s edited collection
Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War as well as Alan
Wald’s The New York Intellectuals and Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole
the Idea of Modernism.
32. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1973), p. 106.
33. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6:5 (1939):
pp. 34–49, p. 47.
34. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 56.
35. Said, The Question, p. 82. Said is referring to a cited passage from Maxime
Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?
36. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 96.
37. See Caryl Phillips’ website at www.carylphillips.com/out-of-africa.html
(downloaded June 25, 2017). Originally published as “Out of Africa,” The
Guardian, February 22, 2003.
38. Phillips, “Out of Africa.”
39. Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation, trans. John Cullen (New York:
Other Press, 2015).
40. Daoud, The Meursault, p. 13.
41. Daoud, The Meursault, p. 60.
42. Daoud, The Meursault, p. 13.
part iii
Application
chapter 14

From Orientalism to Islamophobia

Mahmut Mutman

Edward W. Said’s Orientalism effected a radical transformation in the

social sciences and humanities in the late twentieth century by changing
the meaning of “Orientalism” from the benevolent Western subject’s
human interest in the East to an apparatus of knowledge and writing
aligned with Western imperial power.1 Said’s coupling of Western power
with knowledge was a direct intervention into the writing of the universal
and transparent grand historical narrative that culminated in the modern
West. Orientalism was ostensibly a discourse of Western “expertise” on the
“East,” its lands, cultures and peoples; but, from Said’s critical perspective,
it was about the West and its power of writing the world in accord with its
own interests and rule and producing itself as the universal subject of
knowledge, reason and civilization. Said’s original insight implied a power-
ful sense of the production of the Orient as a vast area of knowledge and
governance, while at the same time he saw this production as an imagina-
tive geography, which distorted a supposedly real Orient and created a
phantasmatic idea of it. As his best critics underlined, however, Said’s
analysis involved a methodological contradiction between two different
concepts of Orientalism: one in which the Orient is constructed as real and
another one in which its reality is distorted.2
While Said’s argument tended to reduce Orientalism to an error of
representation, Orientalism (and Neo-Orientalism) might be better read as
a series of political, cultural, and scientiﬁc and disciplinary practices, i.e.
performative acts which “world” the Oriental world, if we employ Gayatri
Spivak’s now-classic use of Heidegger’s concept of worlding.3 “Worlding”
is an act that is both violating and creative of what it worlds. It assumes that
the world that is worlded is uninscribed nature, i.e. not worlded before.
Geo-graphy as earth-writing, i.e. the act of mapping, is an instance of this,
but so are Flaubert’s travel writings, an ethnography of the customs of
India or a speech by Lord Cromer, the British controller-general in Egypt.
Cartography or geography always appear in articulation with a spatializing
255
256 mahmut mutman
of time, i.e. history as progress, which pushes the othered native back in
time. Therefore, what enables us to bring a heterogeneous material (from
scientiﬁc, journalistic texts and government reports to literary and artistic
products) together under the term “Orientalism” is the fact that they are all
based upon and perform this spacing and temporalizing act, which was
described by Said as “an ontological and epistemological distinction made
between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’”4 Rather than
merely comparing two different cultural worlds, however, these various
texts converge in producing the Orient by “making statements about it,
authorizing views about it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.”5 They
inscribe the East and the Eastern as given objects of interest, knowledge
and governance and the West as the empty universal position occupied by a
(Western) rational subject of knowledge, to whom such an object appears.

Post–Oil Crisis World: A Discursive Shift in Orientalism

In 1981, Said published another book, titled Covering Islam. His particular
focus was the Western media images of Islam, which had a marked
intensity following the oil crisis in 1973 and the Iranian hostage crisis in
1979–1981. Although Said continued to use the concept of Orientalism and
did not use the term “Neo-Orientalism” in this work, the new analysis he
offered seemed to point to a new conjuncture in the West’s hegemonic
relationship with the Middle East.6 He argued that what the oil crisis
communicated to the Western consumer was a strong sense of disruption
and loss of control, which was accompanied by the sudden appearance of a
certain image of Islam in the Western media. What was decisive for Said
was the lack of any causal, historical or narrative connection between the
shortage of oil experienced as a loss of control and the image of rich and
well-armed Muslims. The result was an “unrestrained and immediate”
image of Islam, an image which functioned as a kind of “proper name
which denoted a simple object to which one can refer immediately.”7 The
new sense of an Islamic threat was further exacerbated with the Iranian
revolution and the hostage crisis. The old Orientalist image of a distant
despotic, primitive and static religion was imperceptibly recoded into a
new technologically produced image of a violent, oppressive and fanatic
religion dangerously too close to the West.
The earliest systematic or methodological use of the term “Neo-
Orientalism” was by a critical scholar of Middle Eastern studies, Dag
Tuastad.8 Through a close critical reading of contemporary neoconserva-
tive writing, Tuastad demonstrated that this literature went far beyond
From Orientalism to Islamophobia 257
describing Islam as a fatalist, backward and despotic religion and estab-
lished a specific connection between “terrorism” and the “Arab” or the
“Muslim mind.” Tuastad called this the “new barbarism” thesis: “presen-
tations of political violence that omit political and economic interests and
contexts when describing that violence, and presenting the violence as
resulting from the traits embedded in local cultures.”9 According to
Tuastad, originated in the writings of Bernard Lewis and Samuel
Huntington and expounded by influential neoconservative pundits such
as Robert Kaplan and Daniel Pipes, the new barbarism thesis resonated
well with the Neo-Orientalist trend in the American academe. Tuastad’s
construction of Neo-Orientalism followed the track of Said’s analysis in
Covering Islam in the sense of the emergence of a new image of Islam,
which precluded any possibility of reflective, narrative and causal link
between the event it signified and Islam as a religion. As we shall see, this
discursive shift created a new perspective and focus and was eventually
transformed into what is now called “Islamophobia.”

New Orientalist Literature

As the themes articulated in the new image of Islam – violence, fanaticism,
terrorism – immediately evoke security concerns, we are reminded of a
founding binarism of the liberal problematic of government as analyzed by
Michel Foucault: freedom/security.10 The governmental concern with the
security of society emerged as an effect of the liberal problematic of
producing and managing freedoms in the nineteenth century. Today’s
discourse of security, however, is produced as contingent on the histori-
cally singular construct of “terrorism” conceived as an aberration rooted in
the problematic religious/cultural difference of Islam as a global and cross-
cultural phenomenon. This has restaged, as expected, the question of the
management of freedoms in Western democracies on the one hand; it has
given birth to a new argument for global security and the “War on Terror”
on the other. In parallel to these discourses of security, we have also
witnessed the surfacing of a new literary writing produced by native
Muslim writers. In an influential article, Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams
described this literature as “Neo-Orientalist.”11 Drawing our attention to a
number of memoirs and autobiographies by Middle Eastern writers (most
famous of which is Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran), Behdad and
Williams have argued that this emerging popular literature contributed to
the new image of Islam disseminated by the new technologies of commu-
nication.12 The new literature constructed Islam as an essentially repressive
258 mahmut mutman
religion based on lack of freedoms. In a critical dialogue with Hamid
Dabashi’s previous critical judgment of such writers as “comprador intel-
lectuals” and “native informers,” Behdad and Williams delineated main
features of the new Orientalist writing, emphasizing especially its appro-
priation and corruption of a certain kind of critical function.13
According to Behdad and Williams, the first and most striking feature of
this new literature is that it is produced by native people of Muslim
societies. Their writing is therefore stamped by a strong claim to authen-
ticity. Constructing themselves as insiders, their writing strategy activates
an apparently critical but actually simplifying theory of stereotype as a false
image of Islam occasioned by the sheer outsider status of the European. As
insiders, these native writers claim to correct stereotypes and misunder-
standings and give the reader a realistic sense of how it feels to live in an
Islamic society. Further, they are not only authentic natives but also
educated and culturally refined people who have a mastery of Western
culture and literature and the ability to produce literary writing. These
aspects position them in a uniquely privileged way: while they have a “feel”
of the culture and religion as insiders, they also have the necessary critical
distance to it as culturally refined authors and intellectuals. They are
therefore authorized to criticize a crude form of identity politics. Being
marked as critical insiders also licenses them to have a direct involvement
in politics without any pretension to impartiality and objectivity. The
declared aim of their politics is often to liberate the Islamicate geography
from the tyranny of religious regimes. Interestingly, almost all of these
writers live in the West, and some, if not all, are associated with conserva-
tive think tanks or institutions. When put together with the “impartial,”
“scientific” knowledge of the Middle East “expert,” their “authentic,”
“internal” knowledge contributes to produce a general consensus on the
essentially repressive nature of Islam, in conformity with the predominant
stereotypes in the Western media. Last but not least, this new writing is
characterized by a journalistic trope of truth, i.e. a writing made up of a
series of isolated empirical observations mixed with empty generalizations.
Behdad and Williams offer Nafisi’s discussion of veiling as an example. She
rightly brings up the issue of male repression, but the question is posed in
simplified terms at the expense of veiling’s historical and cultural
complexity.
These main features inevitably arouse a question. If this new form of
native Orientalist writing is bent on the issue of freedom in the Islamicate
world, what is the concept of freedom that it defends? This is a loosely
employed, negative concept of freedom, according to which freedom is
From Orientalism to Islamophobia 259
seen, in a highly restricted manner, as “freedom-from” rather than “free-
dom-to.” Such a received idea of freedom is considered to be a natural
aspect of Western polity and culture, indicating a superior stage that the
backward and oppressive Islamicate cultures have yet to achieve. This
position, completely naturalized in Western political cultures and unprob-
lematically maintained by these writers, forecloses any possibility
of questioning the United States and Western involvement in the world
of Islamicate societies (from US and British support to the overthrow of
Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 to the United States–led invasion of Iraq in
2003, both of which curtailed freedoms and led to repression and chaos in
these countries) as well as the ongoing Western support of authoritarian
regimes in the Middle East.

Islamophobia: The Rise of an Ethico-political Concept

Although the use of the term “Islamophobia” goes as far back as the early
twentieth century, we owe its contemporary currency to an influential
report by the London-based Runnymede Trust published in 1997, four
years before the 9/11 attacks.14 Despite its national and other limitations, it
is the Runnymede report that put the concept of “Islamophobia” on the
global agenda as an ethico-political and explanatory category. Underlying
the need for terminological and conceptual novelty in understanding and
explaining the increasingly negative attitude toward Islam and Muslims in
the United Kingdom, the report proposed the concept of “Islamophobia”
as “recognizably similar to ‘xenophobia’ and ‘europhobia’ and … a useful
shorthand way of referring to dread or hatred of Islam – and, therefore, to
fear or dislike of all or most Muslims.”15 The term has rapidly become a
legitimate category in naming a certain commonly recognizable fear and
hatred of Islam and Muslims and has been extensively discussed and
studied since then.16 It did not go unchallenged, however. Fred Halliday
argued for instance that “‘Islamophobia’, like its predecessor ‘imperialism’,
can too easily be used to silence critics of national states and elites.”17 While
the possibility of abuse of such a term is always open in language, especially
in today’s increasingly globalized and complex political world, it seems
hard to deny the alarming popularity and currency of a highly charged
negative attitude toward Muslims and Islam. Islamophobia attributes an
essentially evil and specifically violent and oppressive nature to Islam in a
stereotyping manner which forecloses rational, analytic and informed
criticism. Despite this, however, the concept itself has been subjected to
critical scrutiny, discussion and elaboration in a number of works.18
260 mahmut mutman
When we speak of “Islamophobia,” we certainly do not speak of an
ideology in a doctrinaire sense. In a comprehensive essay on the concept,
Arun Kundnani defined it as “the lay ideology of US-led Empire.”19 I
suggest that we see Islamophobia as a certain kind of psychic, discursive
and political formation, which is historically part of an Orientalist Western
imperial worlding and which expresses a certain performance of it under
specific social, political and cultural circumstances. Edward Said’s observa-
tion of a new “unrestrained and immediate image of Islam, functioning
like a proper name” in the post–oil crisis conjuncture can be read as the
historical forerunner of today’s Islamophobia. Throughout the late 1990s
and early 2000s, this image was increasingly transformed by neoconserva-
tive writing and by the media (particularly following the 9/11 attacks) into
one which established a specific link between terrorism and the Muslim
mind, as observed by Tuastad. When we say image, here, we are talking
about an “image in the mind” (an idea or notion which spontaneously
arises in the mind as soon as it is signified), as well as a technologically
produced image and a discursively produced set of statements or ideas. It is
therefore not simply external but also internal(ized), and it is not simply
visual but also associated with, or emerging out of, a flow of words as well as
visual images.
Kundnani suggests that we see Islamophobia as consisting of five major
statements or ideas that delineate and target “Islam” and/or “Muslims”: (i)
“Muslims are prone to violence” (Islamic concepts such as martyrdom and
“jihad” are taken in isolation); (ii) “Muslims are extremists” (seen as
intolerant of other views, full of rage and anger, and suppressing freedom
and rejecting reason); (iii) “Muslim men oppress women” (who are by
definition subservient); (iv) “Muslims engage infiltration” (they have hid-
den subversive networks, are like a virus, are disloyal and are involved in
double talk); (v) “Muslims are sexually dysfunctional” (what lies behind
the Muslim men’s aggressive and violent behavior is their repressed sexu-
ality; women produce too many children, constituting a demographic
threat, etc.).20 These affective ideas or statements, all of which are negative,
disturbing and anxiety-ridden (violence, extremism, oppression, secrecy,
perversion), are often linked to each other in a fluent, associative chain and
are projected onto Muslims. (They are not necessarily articulated in a
systematic and coherent argument – even though there might be attempts
toward this.) Such a projection enables the projecting subject to secure a
moral position with regard to the object of his/her projection, though in an
entirely phantasmatic way. It is not only that the complex reality of a
religion is reduced to a number of selective features. But, responding to
From Orientalism to Islamophobia 261
internal psychic needs and never simply external evidence (which only
appears once the belief is established), such distortion constructs an ima-
ginary scenario, or fantasy, in which Muslims or Islam function as a major
threat. This also implies that, in the case of the white working class, the
anxiety and suffering rooted in the social and economic position is dis-
placed onto a “racial other” seen as the cause of the problem.

Islamophobia: Culturalization and Racialization

Given that Islam is not a race, is Islamophobia racism? Answering this
question might actually help us to understand Islamophobia better. What
is at stake in racism is always a racialization. That this racialization usually
selects skin color and/or physiological features as racial markers does not
necessarily mean that this will always be the case, for the border that
separates nature from culture can never be fixed once and for all. In the
case of Islamophobia, a number of aspects are first chosen as cultural and
then treated in the same way as biological features.
When examined closely, the structure of Islamophobia bears a striking
similarity to the structure of other racisms such as “Negrophobia” and anti-
Semitism, as comparatively analyzed by Franz Fanon in his Black Skin
White Masks.21 Fanon demonstrated how these different racisms repeat the
same psychic structure: projection of internal, repressed and unconscious
fears and anxieties onto externally chosen phobic objects (“imaginary
scenario”). Fanon distinguished between what was then called
“Negrophobia” and anti-Semitism: while the former constructed blackness
on an “instinctual” level and biologized it directly (e.g. the myth of the
black man’s excessive sexuality, hence the necessity of his castration); the
latter constructed the Jewish threat in intellectual or mental terms (e.g.
Jewish conspiracy). It might be argued that the construction of an “Islamic
threat” is closer to the construction of the Jewish conspiracy in terms of the
emphasis put on religious difference. While historically Judaism was seen
by Europe as an internal and Islam as an external threat, today the latter has
become seen as an internal threat.22 But the differences are also important:
“Islamic threat” is part of a multicultural world in which a sense of cultural
difference has acquired a special significance. Describing this phenomenon
as “culturalisation of religion,” Yeğenoğlu argues that “it is the excess of the
religiosity of Islam, that is, its becoming a marker of cultural identity that
now contributes to the making of Islam as the internal enemy of Europe.”23
Since this religious excess is seen as originated in the backwardness of Islam
(its so-called failure to separate politics from religion), it is associated with
262 mahmut mutman
violence. Hence violence, oppression (especially of women) and barbarism
become cultural markers which give the religion of Islam a distinct
cultural identity. The culturalization of religion thus implies a radical,
non-negotiable cultural difference because it refers to a culture that is the
very opposite of the concept of culture. Made up of violence and oppres-
sion in its very essence, Islamophobia’s “Islam” signifies a culture – that is
to say, something learned and transmitted – but what is learned and
transmitted is a non-cultural culture, or culture at its most “primitive”
level, the one that is closest to the violence of nature, hence intolerable,
unassimilable, etc. Its persistence as culture (its backward and repressive
nature via religious excess) is what makes it a threat to the civilized
community of rational people.
This culturalization is also the particular form racialization takes in
Islamophobic racism. Depending on the phenomenological insight
that the clothing is not an external object but a part of one’s corporeal
schema – i.e. the way one navigates in space – and a kind of
supplementary skin, Alia Al-Saji constructed the Muslim woman’s
veil as the surface of racialization.24 Fanon’s analysis of racialization
must be further complicated in the case of Islam, for “race and
gender … rely on and function through one another.”25 Various
different forms of covering the body in Islam are homogenized, and
the veil of the Muslim woman is made a metonym of Muslim culture.
This not only constructs the Western woman as the ideal woman, free
of oppression, but it also projects the very mechanism of patriarchal
gender oppression onto the veil of the Muslim woman as the means
by which racialization of Islam takes place. Perceiving gender oppres-
sion in the veil allows the Islamophobic gaze to other not just Muslim
women but also Muslim men, family, life and culture as oppressive
and violent. The veil becomes a point of condensation of the five
statements Kundnani identified as constitutive of Islamophobia. It
also becomes the focal point from which a narrative of “saving the
Muslim woman from oppression” can be constructed. Last but not
least, Al-Saji reminds us of Fanon’s observation in Algeria: while
Muslim men do not see the veiled women, the French men want to
see what is behind the veil.26 The veil has produced a problem of
seeing for Western subjects from the very beginning, even though it is
designated as the most visible marker of Muslim identity. We can
further ask perhaps whether the racialization of the Muslim veil as a
darkening or blinding of the space of vision has to do with death
drive.27 The choice of the veil as marker can be considered as the
From Orientalism to Islamophobia 263
rationally (or techno-rationally) organized Western subject’s desire of
bringing his blind spot into visibility and thus securing his mastery in
a phantasmatic projection.

Islamophobia and Securitization

We have defined Islamophobia as an ideological and psychic forma-
tion based on a phantasmatic notion of Islamic threat. But given the
actual presence of jihadist movement and the actions of organiza-
tions such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, is it right to call Islamic threat and
the Western subject’s need for security phantasmatic? Phantasm here
cannot be placed in opposition to reality, but it is indeed a con-
stitutive part of it. Especially in situations of conflict, there is a
positive feedback loop, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy – even
though such a mechanism is always effaced by a powerful Western
inscription. “Islam” before and after the Orientalist worlding is not
the same Islam but one that has increasingly consolidated and
essentialized its religious difference under and through hegemonic
Western worlding of the world, while such re-production is rendered
unreadable by the homogeneous empty time of “progress” based on
pushing the other back in time. To this we must add a salient
historical point made by Mahmood Mamdani: the strong US sup-
port given to Islamist movements during the Cold War positioned
Islamism in a particular way. The same “terrorists” – called “freedom
fighters” then and cultivated by the US government – came back to
haunt their creators.28
When, in Covering Islam, Edward Said recognized the new image of
Islam, which transformed a distant backward religion into a threat, his
concern was the technologically produced nature of this instant, immedi-
ate and sensational image. In a fine critical engagement with Said’s work,
Tiziana Terranova underlies Said’s concern with “tele-technologies … that
is, technologies, which act a distance, and on different tactical uses of
information, in order to induce specific corporeal and cognitive effects.”29
For Terranova, Said realized that the irruption of Islam into the American
public sphere provoked a strong affect of disruption, dependence and
feeling of loss of control over a “natural,” taken-for-granted resource
such as oil. In describing this image as immediate and unrestrained, Said
referred to “the decline of the narrative framework that allowed the critic to
speak and be understood by an interpretive community.”30 The new
disorienting image made the criticism of cultural hegemony impossible.
264 mahmut mutman
Terranova demonstrates how this real mutation of Orientalism was intro-
duced by a new technology of power, which depended on publicity,
communication management and opinion-making, and corresponded to
a new mode of conflict, an information warfare.31 Terranova’s criticism
focuses on Said’s commitment to an older form of critical narrative that
aims to establish the proper causal link (for instance, between political
economy of oil and terrorism), whereas the new hegemony “does not
primarily operate at the level of statements, although it can take that
form, but one that considers those statements as part of a primary assem-
blage that links together statements, images and passions in the duration of
a body, whereby affect functions as a mechanism of passage between
affective and empirical facts.”32
Terranova emphasizes that what is at stake now is a biopolitics,
which captures and forms the public affectively by contemporary
media (the public here considered as part of the continuum of
population, which is the object of biopolitics).33 However, if she
gives a fine description of a striking aspect of the Neo-Orientalist
conjuncture, her critical engagement with Said shares something of his
categorical opposition between immediate, sensational image (affective
fact) and narrative mediation that establishes a causal link (empirical,
causal fact). Indeed, what Terranova called the new technology of
power not only consists of affective capture but also and more
importantly an apparatus of security or, better put, an assemblage of
securitization of social and political space. The new assemblage oper-
ates also by producing a series of statements and narratives all cen-
tered around the proper names “Islam,” “terrorism,” “jihadism”: for
instance, narratives and discourses of security, or the new Orientalist
literature by native writers from Muslim countries. The “War on
Terror,” constructed as a police action against criminals, is a narrative
which collapses the distinction between reality and fiction; the phan-
tasm itself is maintained in and by reality, through the militarization
of perception itself. Assemblage of security is a hegemonic mechanism
to avoid political and social responses to global injustice. Jihadist
response is a historical product of this systematic, structural avoid-
ance, an actualization of techno-rationality, of political decisionism
based on cognitive mapping, informatics and control. It is important
to emphasize in conclusion that Islamophobia, as perverted and
abnormal as it might sound to the good average citizen of Western
liberal democracies, is essential to the contemporary assemblages and
practices of securitization. What lies behind the violent world it
From Orientalism to Islamophobia 265
created is a violent refusal of social, economic and political justice on
a global scale.

Notes
1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003 [1978]).
2. James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-
Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1988), pp. 255–276; Robert Young, “Disorienting
Orientalism,” in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New
York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 119–140.
3. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), pp. 212–213.
4. Said, Orientalism, p. 2.
5. Said, Orientalism, p. 3.
6. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine
How We See the Rest of the World, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1997
[1981]). Said’s use of the concept of Orientalism after Covering Islam is not
systematic, except in a reconsideration of his work and responses to it:
“Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (Autumn 1985): pp. 89–107.
In Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), he refers to it as a
case of the general relationship between “culture” and “empire.”
7. Said, Covering Islam, p. 41.
8. Dag Tuastad, “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of
Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s),” Third World Quarterly
24:4 (2003): pp. 591–599.
9. Tuastad, “Neo-Orientalism,” p. 592. Tuastad borrowed the “new barbarism
thesis” from a previous study by Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest:
War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone (Oxford: James Currey, 1996). His
application of the “new barbarism thesis” is in consistency with Said’s
emphasis on the lack of narrativization and contextualization in Covering
Islam.
10. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France
1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador,
2008).
11. Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams, “Neo-Orientalism,” in Globalizing American
Studies, eds. Brian T. Edwards and Dilip P. Gaonkar (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 283–299.
12. Behdad and Williams read the following works as representative of the new
trend: Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York:
Random House, 2003); Roya Hakakian, Journey from the Land of No: A
Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (New York: Three Rivers Press,
2005); Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (New York: Riverhead Books,
2003); Yasmina Khadra, The Swallows of Kabul (New York: Anchor Books,
266 mahmut mutman
2005); Saira Shah, The Storyteller’s Daughter: One Woman’s Return to Her Lost
Homeland (New York: Anchor Books, 2004).
13. Behdad and Williams refer to Hamid Dabashi’s “Native Informers and the
Making of the American Empire,” Al-Ahram Weekly, June 1, 2006 (available
at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm). Dabashi elaborated
his criticism in a later and more comprehensive work, Brown Skin, White
Masks (New York and London: Pluto Press, 2011), which involves other
figures such as V. S. Naipaul, Fouad Ajami and Dinesh D’Souza. He does
not employ a specific category of “Neo-Orientalism” and instead sees these
writers as contemporary representatives of Orientalism. For a critique of the
anthropological concept of “native informant,” see Mahmut Mutman, The
Politics of Writing Islam: Voicing Difference (London: Bloomsbury, 2014),
especially pp. 13–57.
14. Islamophobia, A Challenge for Us All: Report of the Runnymede Trust
Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, Runnymede Trust, April
1997. The Runnymede Trust’s “Commission on British Muslims and
Islamophobia,” which produced the report, was established in 1996 and was
chaired by Gordon Conway.
15. Islamophobia, A Challenge for Us All, p. 1.
16. Chris Allen, Islamophobia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Andrew Shryock, ed.,
Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); S. Sayyid and Abdoolkarim
Vakil, eds., Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011); John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin, eds.,
Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011); Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics
of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012); George Morgan and Scott
Poynting, eds., Global Islamophobia: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012); David Tyrer, The Politics of Islamophobia:
Race, Power and Fantasy (London: Pluto Press, 2013); Arun Kundnani, The
Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror
(New York: Verso, 2014).
17. Fred Halliday, “Islamophobia Reconsidered,” Ethnic and Racial Studies
22:5 (September 1999): pp. 892–902, p. 900. Although Halliday claims to
have a balanced view criticizing both sides, his approach leaves little
room for criticism of systematic global inequality. Similar arguments
against the use of the term are also made by Salman Rushdie and
Christopher Hitchens. It is not clear in these criticisms of the term
why it should not be possible to distinguish criticism of Islam from an
Islamophobic attitude. In fact, this makes one wonder if the criticism
itself is the rationalization of a certain feeling of panic akin to
Islamophobia, for exactly the opposite of what these critics of the
concept imagine is also a fact: far-right, racist groups construct them-
selves as defenders of liberal and democratic values against “violent,
oppressive, and barbaric Islam.”
From Orientalism to Islamophobia 267
18. A significant reference is Chris Allen’s meticulously written Islamophobia
(2010). Allen particularly offered a critical reading of the shortcomings of
the Runnymede report. The concept of Islamophobia has led to considerable
academic productivity, which examined its several aspects in different fields,
such as the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy (Tyrer, 2013), the concept of
moral panic (Morgan and Poynting, 2012), radicalization thesis and the war
on terror (Kundnani, 2014) and the relationship between class and empire
(Kumar, 2012). There is an Islamophobia Studies Journal established by the
“Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project,” at the Center for Race
and Gender, University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and currently pub-
lished by the Pluto Press.
19. Arun Kundnani, “Islamophobia: Lay Ideology of US-led Empire,” www.ku
ndnani.org/draft-paper-on-islamophobia-as-lay-ideology-of-us-led-empire/
(accessed March 13, 2019).
20. Kundnani, “Islamophobia,” pp. 3–4.
21. Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), chapter 6,
especially pp. 124–125.
22. The historical analysis of the European concept of enemy can be found in Gil
Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), and the recent transformation of Islam from external
to internal threat is analyzed in Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Islam, Migrancy and
Hospitality in Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). This is not
meant to be a comparative analysis of different racisms. I am only making a
few general observations following Fanon, with the purpose of specifying
Islamophobia.
23. Yeğenoğlu, Islam, Migrancy and Hospitality, p. 168. It is important to
keep in mind that Islamophobia is still part of a liberal multicultural
hegemonic order, which has to distinguish the good from the bad
Muslim, which never blames Islam as a whole and even marks
Islamophobia as a danger. Islamophobia is not the same thing as the
culturalization of religion but an effect of the same system to which
multiculturalism belongs (which is why Yeğenoğlu speaks of “contribut-
ing”). That this distinction becomes necessary is what distinguishes the
system as relatively open in the sense of an in-built mechanism of
correction without solution.
24. Alia Al-Saji, “The Racilization of Muslim Veils: A Philosophical Analysis,”
Philosophy and Social Criticism 36:8 (2010): pp. 875–902.
25. Al-Saji, “The Racialization of Muslim Veils,” p. 888.
26. Al-Saji, “The Racialization of Muslim Veils,” p. 885.
27. Meyda Yeğenoğlu emphasizes the aspect of desire: “The invisibility the veil
secures for the colonial other is simultaneously the point at which desire is
articulated and the ground upon which the scopic drive of the subject is
displaced, for there is always the threat of the return of the look of the other.”
Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 62.
268 mahmut mutman
28. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and
the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004).
29. Tiziana Terranova, “Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-racism and
Hegemony as Noopolitics,” Theory, Culture and Society 24:3 (2007): p. 128. In
this part I am drawing on Terranova’s admirable critical engagement with
Said.
30. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” p. 129; Said, Covering Islam, pp. 36–68.
31. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” p. 130.
32. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” pp. 133–134.
33. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” pp. 139–141.
chapter 15

Applications of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia

in Recent Writing
Peter Morey

Early on in Orientalism, Edward Said makes a crucial point about the

exteriority of the Orientalist text: the fact that the Orientalist always stands
outside and apart from that which he is describing. Considering Aeschylus’
The Persians as an early paradigmatic example, he comments:
My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis on the evi-
dence, which is by no means invisible, for such representations as representa-
tions, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient … The things to look for are
style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social
circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to
some great original.1
This draws our attention to the fact that Orientalism, its more recent
manifestation Neo-Orientalism and the attendant phenomenon of
Islamophobia are all particular systems of knowledge production.
Therefore our focus should be as much on the context in which
these representations are produced, the forms they take and the
means by which they are circulated as on what they tell us about
Islam or the Orient.
The subsequent enthusiastic elevation of Orientalism to become the
defining text for global postcolonial studies means that it is sometimes
forgotten that its focus is specifically on European perceptions of the Arab
world. Islam is central to those feelings of estrangement, threat and cultural
superiority the European Orientalist has experienced – even if that same
complacency often travels with him elsewhere around the world. Said’s
specific insights into Islamophobia, garnered from years in the service of
the Palestinian cause, are developed further in his later book Covering
Islam. In that volume, Said describes how Islam’s fate within the general
structure of Orientalism “has been to be looked at first of all as if it were a
monolithic thing, and then with a very special hostility and fear.”2 As a
result, he observes, “malicious generalisations about Islam have become the
269
270 peter morey
last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West”: some-
thing that appears even truer now in our fractious post-9/11 world.3
In this chapter, I wish to consider some of the features of this revived
Orientalism, or Neo-Orientalism. It is necessary to consider how it works
as a mode of hegemonic knowledge production about the Muslim Other.
This entails acknowledging the many stereotypes that have accrued around
Muslims and Islam in both scholarly and popular discourse. Deepa Kumar
has identified four key features of Orientalism that we can use to mark the
parameters of modern Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia too: a civiliza-
tional view of history; an assumption that all knowledge of a civilization
can be derived from its texts and languages; a particular focus on classical
and religious works; and a tendency to operate through established race
theories.4 Understanding this confluence of Neo-Orientalism and
Islamophobia means considering the political utility of such assumptions,
not least the fetishization of gender and its use in political rhetoric about
“saving” Muslim women from Islamic patriarchal oppression – a colonial
mode of thinking with particular political efficacy in the early years of the
“War on Terror” but which is still prevalent today whenever the issues of
supposed Muslim self-segregation or female dress codes become the focus
of public debate.
Perhaps the key shift in the Neo-Orientalist dissemination of
Islamophobia is best seen in the wave of popular memoirs and novels by
and about Muslim women and their experiences. These tend to make their
appeal via a uniform litany of male abuse, justified by religion and tradition
and often sanctioned by the state, and a yearning for the kind of liberated
life women in the West are presumed to enjoy. This subgenre – variously
termed “Pulp Non-fiction,” “New Orientalism,” “Orientalist Feminism”5
or “Muslim Misery Memoirs” – became highly lucrative in the early years
of the twenty-first century, with its genre-shifting qualities and claims to
truth and authenticity. I will consider one example of this phenomenon,
Åsne Seierstad’s bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul, both for what it tells us
about these truth claims and for what it reveals about the inevitable cultural
blind spots and contradictions that accompany Orientalism, old and new.6
I will then conclude with a brief consideration of the new technologies by
which Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia are circulated and the extent to
which they constitute a new episteme, characterized by Hamid Dabashi as
“Post-Orientalism,” wherein anti-Muslim prejudice slews off its scholarly
trappings and enters the viral circuits of modern communication to con-
tribute to what has recently been termed “post-truth politics.”7
Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 271
It is possible to argue that Orientalism never really went away. After the
end of direct European imperialism, its supposed insights were of use to the
emerging global power of the United States. Orientalist knowledge was
folded into the US academy after World War II under the cover of Area
Studies programs and departments. However, Islamophobia, relying on
Orientalist prejudices, gained renewed traction after the Iranian
Revolution and hostage crisis of 1979–1981 and the increasing centrality
of Israel to American strategic interests in the Middle East. Popular films
from the period around the decline of the Soviet bloc – such as Delta Force
(1986) and True Lies (1994) – recast Muslims as the prime enemy of
America, a trend that has continued in the post-9/11 period with the
popularity of television series like Fox’s 24 and Showtime’s Homeland in
which the Muslim threat is ever-present.
However, the seeming ubiquity of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia
ought not to blind us to the extent to which they have to be constantly
created, renewed and maintained. Kumar reminds us that, in fact, attitudes
to Islam and Muslims in the West have changed across history: from an
early, baffled curiosity; the comparative harmony of La Convivencia in
Moorish Spain; the hostility of the crusades; and the Romantic-era fascina-
tion with the “Gorgeous East” through to the most recent phase in which
US policies toward Muslim countries have often been pragmatic and
varied. (The United States famously feted and used the Mujahideen against
the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s, at the same time as it
was warning of the threat from Iran.)8 Kumar points out that anti-Muslim
prejudice has been constructed and promoted by elites for political reasons,
a process we can still trace today in the fulminations of politicians, journal-
ists and bloggers in search of an enemy to blame or a distraction from other
intractable problems.9 During the War on Terror it was necessary to create
a “spectacle of fear” around Muslims and Islam to bolster support for an
illegal imperialist foreign policy.10 Continuing this mission into the
Obama and Trump years, a highly organized network of Islamophobic
opinion-formers – many with direct links to the corridors of political
power – have ensured that an avalanche of suspicion and invective con-
tinues to flow.11
One of the central implications of Orientalism that continues to hold
sway is the notion that Muslims’ behavior is directly attributable to some-
thing in their religion and culture. It is common to hear claims that
Muslims are violent because their holy book sanctions jihad – along with
a host of other nefarious, antisocial practices such as lying, polygamy and
paedophilia. In their modern manifestation on the Internet and social
272 peter morey
media, these insults can be seen for what they are. However, even among
the more ostensibly respectable proponents of academic Orientalism, there
is still a tendency to assume the existence of an “Oriental mind” or a
“Muslim mind,” the characteristics of which are shared by all adherents of
the faith and which causes them to conduct themselves in certain ways.
This kind of collectivist branding – which would be entirely unacceptable
if applied to the white Western world, where individualism is assumed to
be a kind of birthright – indicates a marked tendency to reify culture when
it comes to Islam: to suggest that culture causes certain behavior. Thus, it
becomes both a one-size-fits-all explanatory system and a predictor of
future behavior. In the name of this putative predictability, all sorts of
sweeps, round-ups, registers and persecution of Muslims have been justi-
fied. The double standard by which, in Wendy Brown’s terms, “we have a
culture while they are a culture” is justified in the work of figures such as
the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis and the political scientist and policy
adviser Samuel Huntington, whose works “The Roots of Muslim Rage”
and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order give a
veneer of scholarly respectability to ways of looking at the world which are
totalizing and divisive.12
The production of Orientalist knowledge takes place through the con-
struction and delimiting of certain types of discourse that have epistemo-
logical and political dimensions. As Usma Jamil puts it, “the politics of
how Muslims are situated in the war on terror in relation to the west is
linked to the construction of knowledge about Muslims and the possibil-
ities for how they are and can be known in the west.”13 At heart, this is
about narrative and power: who gets to speak for and about Islam and
Muslims, and how are the categories constructed by which such speech is
legitimated? Orientalism arrogates to itself the capacity to organize the
terms in which the Orient is discussed. This means that only certain
perspectives that conform to known and sanctioned topics and viewpoints
are recognized as legitimate. As Said puts it, Orientalism can be seen as a
“corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by
making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by
teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western
style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the
Orient.”14 This is as much a case of what Michel Foucault would call
“incitement to discourse” as it is of censuring or censorship.15 Certain kinds
of speech about the Islamic Orient are encouraged, and Muslims who
would address the debate about themselves in any way are effectively
obliged to take on the discourse and operate within these parameters.
Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 273
Central among the discursive assumptions of Orientalism is the absolute
difference between the individualist West and the collectivist East. We
have already seen how this binary distinction plays out when it comes to
the understanding of motivation and behavior. Its totalizing tendencies
also mean that all Muslims are, in effect, held collectively accountable for
acts of terror and required to repudiate them, whereas other groups are not.
In the terms coined by the sociologist Erving Goffman, Muslims are
obliged by Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia permanently to “bear the
stigma” of their outsider status.16 The difference between a “good Muslim”
and a “bad Muslim” therefore often has less to do with his or her political
propensities and more to do with their willingness to engage in a kind of
group mea culpa, by denouncing terrorism in a way no other group is
required to do, so as to satisfy and legitimize the judgments of a Western
audience. In this way, a kind of tacit agreement or discursive frame is
placed around Muslims and what can be said about them.17 According to
Dabashi, the knowledge produced
is then objectified via its circulation in the mass media and legitimized by
the power that announces and enunciates it and subsequently internalized as
truth, and thus not just generates collective consensus about Islam or “the
Middle East” but in fact defines the terms of occasional or accidental dissent
and contestation of them.18
In other words, a particular reality is discursively constructed, which
Muslims are then required to inhabit.
The West’s privilege to define the terms of any discourse about Muslims
is, then, at the heart of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia as hegemonic
discourses. Along with a view of Islam as an inherently violent religion that
blinds its adherents to reason and thereby tends to make them incapable of
self-rule, the other persistent myth drawn upon in these discourses is that
“Islam is a uniquely sexist religion.”19 The combination of religiously
sanctioned resistance to reform and long-standing, regressive patriarchal
power is taken to mean that Muslim women bear the brunt of the failings
of Islamic culture. Once more, this is an attempt to freeze not just Islamic
societies but also ways of looking at them. Mohja Kahf has shown that, far
from being essential or static, the image of the Muslim woman in Western
culture evolves and shifts across time – from the medieval queen or noble-
woman who could transgress Western norms of female behavior to the
more familiar Orientalist image of the helpless damsel sequestered in the
seraglio of later centuries. This latter image emerged with the Romantic
sensibility of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and
274 peter morey
accompanied the spread of European colonialism.20 The veil and segrega-
tion as the epitome of Islamic culture’s victimization of women becomes
what Leila Ahmed has called the “framestory” within which Western
understandings of Muslim women are played out.21
It is significant that this frame story is continually revived as a feature of
contemporary Neo-Orientalism. In the lead-ups to both the 1991 Gulf War
and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the plight of the woman in Muslim
lands was repeatedly invoked to justify military action. Miriam Cooke
notes how neo-imperialism invokes women’s rights in order to universalize
the view that Muslim women need saving (and that Western intervention
is the way to achieve this). For example, the then–US president’s wife,
Laura Bush, took to the airwaves in November 2001 and spoke of the need
to save Afghan women from the Taliban: “Civilized people throughout the
world are speaking out in horror – not only because our hearts break for the
women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we
see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us.”22 Cooke
wryly observes: “Here we see the return of the civilizational binary that
structures the logic of empire … The US government’s fight against
brutality, the First Lady assures her listeners, is not the expression of a
specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity.”23
The direct appeal to the values of women’s rights used in these cam-
paigns aims to bring contemporary feminism to bear to underwrite what is
still, after all, a male Western political order in its dealing with cultural
Others. We seem in danger of once more entering a realm in which “white
men are saving brown women from brown men,” as Gayatri Spivak
famously declared.24 (While there was assent from some more conservative
quarters, it ought to be noted, however, that this attempt to pressgang
feminists was viewed with skepticism by anti-imperialist feminists who
recognized the ruse for what it was and who were schooled in the necessities
of understanding women’s struggles in their respective contexts.)
Although it may have met with limited endorsement from more politi-
cally aware feminists, this polarizing rhetoric of saving Muslim women did
find a ready outlet in the tide of popular novels and memoirs that hit the
shelves in the early years of the twenty-first century. Lila Abu-Lughod
describes the main features of this “lurid genre of writing on abused
women” she terms “Pulp Non-Fiction”:
The recurrent and defining themes of this genre are force and bondage. At
one end are gentle memoirs like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran,
journalistic accounts like Åsne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, and
Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 275
polemics like Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s The Caged Virgin and its sequels … At the
less respectable end are books with an even wider readership. … Here we are
plunged into dystopic worlds of violent abuse, our guides the Muslim girls
who have suffered and escaped.25
This kind of book tends to underwrite the human rights/women’s rights
mix used to justify empire, flavoring it with the spice of (often highly
fictionalized) personal testimony. The age-old tropes of imprisonment and
emancipation are wheeled out again, only this time often told in the first-
person voices of the victims themselves rather than through the gaze of the
Orientalist rescuer. Fatemeh Keshavarz has distinguished between what
she calls “New Orientalist” and “Old Orientalist” texts by pointing out
that in conventional Orientalism we are presented with an outside per-
spective by a foreign “expert,” whereas the new form has a “native,”
insider tone. However, New Orientalism “replicates the totalizing – and
silencing – tendencies of the Old Orientalists by virtue of erasing, through
unnuanced narration, the complexity and richness in the local culture.”26
As Dohra Ahmad has observed, these texts speak the language of Western
feminism, recounting tales of free liberal subjects waiting to emerge from
under the yoke of Islam. Yet they all omit, almost as a matter of policy, any
account of the structural connections between the oppression the prota-
gonists suffer and the historical meddling of the United States – which is,
on the contrary, often painted as a sort of utopia – and those strategic
interests that have worked to sustain the kinds of authoritarian regimes of
which the writers complain.27
What is of particular interest in the more complex of these
narratives – what I have elsewhere called “Muslim misery mem-
oirs” – is their generic hybridity.28 Keshavarz sums up the qualities
that make such “New Orientalist” texts successful:
They often have an informal tone and a hybrid nature that make for an
accessible read. Most of them blend travel writing, personal memoir,
journalistic reporting, and social commentary. They show an awareness of
the power of the personal voice, nostalgia in exilic literature, the assurance
that comes with insider knowledge, and the certainty of eyewitness
accounts.29
The position of the journalist Åsne Seierstad, as an “outsider” to the
culture of Kabul she is describing, makes the Neo-Orientalist bestseller The
Bookseller of Kabul a somewhat different creature in the manner by which it
establishes authenticity and authority. Likewise, narrative power is, in
effect, predicated on the very conventional, old Orientalist device of the
276 peter morey
unchanging, silent Other who cannot speak for herself and who must
therefore be represented by the more privileged Western female narrator.
Nevertheless, I will argue that its particular quality of journalistic imme-
diacy coupled with novelistic focalization works both to underscore the
text’s truth claims and, at the same time, to draw our attention to the
artifice by which these claims are staked. Once more, the main objects of
sympathy in this text are the oppressed Afghan womenfolk. However, for
all its sense of feminist outrage and seemingly confident moral prognoses,
the text also displays an unexpected level of anxiety about the project of
“unveiling” the East to the West and in particular about the legitimacy of
writing as a mode of conveying another culture with which it has a
problematic relationship. In the end, it is not so much a case of generic
transgression as of generic incompatibility, where contending elements in
the narrative undermine and pull away from the central ideological
message.
Indeed, in the real world outside the text, making certain truth claims
got Seierstad directly into trouble. Between 2003 – shortly after the pub-
lication of The Bookseller of Kabul – and 2011, Seierstad found herself the
subject of a lawsuit filed by the book’s central figure, accusing her of
defamation.30 Shah Muhammad Rais, the real-life bookseller on whom
Seierstad’s Sultan Khan is based, expressed outrage at the way he and his
family had been depicted, having opened their home to Seierstad in the
spring of 2002, as the country (and the family) began the process of
reconstruction after five years of Taliban rule. Seierstad had been given
special access to many areas of family life, following both male and female
members into what are usually gender-segregated spaces. However, it was
her somewhat free use of a narrative voice that claimed access also to their
innermost thoughts – and which was used to articulate feelings of acute
victimhood, especially among the women – that raised eyebrows among
other writers on Afghanistan.31 It also raised ethical questions about
appropriate journalistic practice, as well as the larger matter of the com-
parative levels of material and representational power enjoyed by the two
parties in the arrangement. Bookseller in effect aspires to something more
than journalistic status, employing fictive strategies to bolster claims that
are anthropological in nature. As with many other examples of textual
Orientalism, readers and reviewers were encouraged to interpret the book
as an accurate, insightful and indeed penetrating account of life in
Afghanistan. In the light of our concerns here, Seierstad’s response to
Rais’ accusations – “It’s a total clash of civilizations” – might also give us
pause.32 For all these reasons, the book and the debate around it
Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 277
encapsulate those continuities between Orientalism and Islamophobia that
are central to my concerns in this chapter.
Seierstad’s story of Sultan, the eponymous bookseller, and his extended
family is framed by the presence of the visiting Western narrator. With its
omniscience and eye for the pathos of individual aspirations and thwarted
lives, Bookseller is more novelistic than one might expect of a more neutral
journalistic portrait. As Amelia Hill says of Seierstad: “Having lived with
the family for so long and questioned them so closely, she says she felt
justified writing from inside the head of each character, attributing
thoughts and feelings to them without the filter of her own voice – as if
she were writing a novel.”33 Once more, it is the generic slippage that takes
place, between the impression of objective veracity implied by journalism
and the fictional devices deployed to create a deeper sense of experiential
empathy, that causes tension.
In the text we are introduced to the self-made bookseller, a contradictory
figure espousing enlightened political views but practicing domestic tyr-
anny: his sons, each frustrated with his lot yet tied down by traditions of
patriarchal deference, taking their frustration out on those weaker than
themselves; the womenfolk, whose lives, circumscribed by rigid codes of
family honor and shame, seem hardly to have improved since the recent
ousting of the Taliban; and especially Leila, Sultan’s youngest sister, the
household drudge, whose hopes of escape through employment or mar-
riage are constantly thwarted. They take the stage with an assortment of
brothers, sisters and cousins, all trying to get by in war-torn Afghanistan
after the 2001 American invasion.
Seierstad recycles many of the usual Orientalist clichés about Islamic
nations – their misogynistic patriarchy, hypocrisy, corruption and tribal-
ism. For the most part, the book’s truth claims are fortified by the
scrupulously “absent” presence of an apparently objective visitor, standing
back from events and relaying her discoveries to us without fear or favour.
However, even a cursory critical interrogation throws up the impossibility
of Seierstad having the claimed insights into the innermost thoughts and
emotional lives of those she describes. In fact, the manipulation of per-
spective is quite overt, matched by shifts in tone and clear editorial
interventions that are highly directive. Indeed, it is those points at which
its mask of studied neutrality drops that are most revealing.
The way the story is set up is highly significant. It is the War on Terror
that brings the narrator to Afghanistan in the first place, traveling with the
Northern Alliance as they move down through the country chasing the
Taliban from power. In the Foreword, Seierstad remarks upon meeting
278 peter morey
Sultan: “I realised that he himself was a living piece of Afghan cultural
history: a history book on two feet … When I left I said to myself: ‘This is
Afghanistan. How interesting it would be to write a book about this
family’” (p. 2). The naivety in this sentence is indicative of that lack of
consideration for questions of power that led Seierstad into such legal
labyrinths. Sultan Khan and his family are mere raw material, curiosities
for a literate observer with the necessary cultural capital and contacts to
exploit in order to construct an international bestseller. Yet, Seierstad needs
to get closer than the normal limits of externally descriptive journalism
would allow. Therefore:
I have written this book in literary form, but it is based on real events or
what was told to me by people who took part in those events. When I
describe the thoughts and feelings, the point of departure is what people told
me they thought or felt in any given situation. Readers have asked me:
“How do you know what goes on inside the heads of the various family
members?” I am not, of course, an omniscient narrator. Internal dialogue and
feelings are based entirely on what family members described to me. (pp. 3–
4) [emphasis added]
The effect of this disclaimer is, of course, precisely to call our attention to
the way in which the narrator appears to be able to enter her characters’
consciousness: whether that is to eavesdrop on whispered asides about a
“third-rate wedding” (p. 106) or to report on the nocturnal scene of
sleeplessness and lamenting in the house of a man accused of stealing
postcards from Sultan’s bookshop (p. 209).
Moreover, although the narrative mimics scrupulous neutrality, in fact
the use of omniscience that tips the book over into a novelistic form also
serves to position us silently but clearly in respect of what we are witnes-
sing. This is particularly true when the topic is women and culture. Before
stepping back, Seierstad has already told us that “I have rarely been as angry
as I was with the Khan family … The same thing was continually provok-
ing me: the manner in which men treated women” (p. 5). Likewise, the
chapter titles editorialize a preferred response. A chapter about women’s
love lyrics is called “Suicide and Song,” while “Billowing, Fluttering,
Winding” sees its female protagonists metonymically reduced to walking
burqas as they visit the local market – the final word, “winding,” is also, of
course, redolent of restriction and the winding sheet of death, further
emphasizing the stifling conditions endured by women. Seierstad
approaches the territory of those other well-known female antagonists of
supposed religiously sanctioned gender oppression, Irshad Manji and
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in fixing on a single garment to evoke restriction, while
Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 279
divorcing it from all historical and cultural explanation. The phrase “Do
You Want My Unhappiness?” – which gives another chapter its title –
could have been uttered by either Shakila, Sultan’s attractive younger
sister, as she contemplates marriage to an unappealing older widower, or
by his disabled and unmarriageable leftover sister, Bulbula, whose pro-
spects are even bleaker. In fact, neither character utters this phrase. It
descends from the heavens as another piece of editorial nudging, an effort
to make sure we understand that the lives of these women are both typical
and relentlessly constrained.
Seierstad is always concerned to make us, first and foremost, experience
her rage at what she witnesses. Indeed, in spite of the pseudo-objectivity
and numerous passages offering guidebook-style accounts of various cus-
toms and traditions, this is what makes her text differ most from more
measured approaches that are concerned to understand social practices
culturally and historically. In her book Do Muslim Women Need Saving?,
the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has emphasized the need for specific
knowledge of local social structures to challenge universalizing and there-
fore neocolonial “rights” discourses, the value of contextual knowledge and
the professional expertise resulting from prolonged exposure in fieldwork.
When Western liberals look at oppression, especially in Muslim countries,
she says, “[w]ithout the contextual information we draw on to judge
similar stories of abuse and violence in North America or Europe, we are
led to attribute those abuses to the culture at large.”34
At the heart of Seierstad’s indictment of Afghanistan is gender oppres-
sion sanctioned and perpetuated within the family by fathers and mothers.
In Seierstad’s omniscient account, Sultan becomes a slightly creepy figure
when, on his journey home from a business trip, he is made to contemplate
with relish the “delicious child-woman” (p. 71) he has taken as his second
wife. The narrative is concerned to depict his polygamy as especially
demeaning to his first wife, but the narrator – whose powers supposedly
give us access to the wife’s feelings of pain and humiliation – has no sense
that an important principle of discretion is likely to be violated by parading
them for the world to see. Or at least, the project of cultural exposure takes
precedence. Seierstad’s viewpoint is entirely culturally conditioned, and
she blunders about like an insensitive tourist, spilling confidences like litter
on a beach. Even so, there is no awareness here that her own perspective
may be partial and Eurocentric, even in those moments where, for exam-
ple, she adopts Western (and Orientalist) cultural paradigms to describe
women washing in the hammam: “The sun’s rays creep in through two
peepholes in the roof, bathing bottoms, breasts and thighs in a picturesque
280 peter morey
light … In two large halls women scrub themselves … Some are
Rubenesquely fat, others thin as rakes with protruding ribs” (p. 161).
However, the book is not entirely without a sort of self-awareness,
one that may or may not be intentional but which acts temporarily to
open up another perspective on the world described. In the late
chapter “My Mother Osama,” there are interesting voice shifts and
momentary perspectives that arguably cause the framing clichés to
jostle with genuine but fleeting insights. In this chapter, one of
Sultan’s nephews, Tajmir, finds himself traveling as translator for an
American magazine journalist, Bob, who is following the hunt for
Osama bin Laden. We learn how the war has brought a burgeoning
market for local translators as journalists scramble for the best stories.
As they journey into the borderlands between Afghanistan and
Pakistan, Tajmir unfolds his life story to a somewhat less-than-riveted
Bob, telling how his domineering mother – the second Osama of the
title – has arranged everything for him, including his marriage. Tajmir
describes how he tells everyone that he wants a daughter:
“So that if we did have a daughter no one would say, how sad, because after
all that is what I had wished for, and if we got a boy no one would say
anything because then everyone would be pleased no matter what”.
“Hm,” says Bob and tries to understand the logic of it all. (pp. 243–244)
Here, as the peculiarities of Afghan marital and reproductive priorities are
laid bare, Bob becomes a sort of substitute for the narrator or for the
Western reader: looking on from outside and embodying our bemused
disorientation. However, Bob is not simply a narratorial surrogate. The
text criticizes him for the careerist self-interest behind his determination to
take himself and Tajmir into one of the most dangerous areas in the world:
“Bob wants violent action in print; like a few weeks ago when he and
Tajmir were nearly killed by a grenade … Even though he is dead scared,
those things make Bob feel he is doing an important job” (p. 247). It would
be going too far to suggest that Seierstad is here offering a reflection on her
own status as one whose occupation is recklessly parasitic on conflict or
that she is launching an open broadside at her colleagues. Even so, there is a
tacit acknowledgement of the profligate drives of Western interest in
Afghanistan. (By contrast, Tajmir just wants to get home in one piece.)
A further intrusion pulls us one step back from full identification with
Bob and his mission and throws into relief the real tactics at work in ways
that call into question many of the Western civilizational assumptions
advanced previously. We learn of Bob’s employers:
Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 281
The magazine is interested because of the American forces in the region, the
secret American Special Forces who are impossible to get close to, the secret
agents crawling around in the mountains hunting for al-Qaida. Bob’s
magazine wants an article, an exclusive article on “The hunt for al-
Qaida”. Most of all the young reporter wants to find Osama bin Laden.
Or at least Mullah Omar. And cover the hunt. The Americans hedge their
bets and work with both sides in the local conflict. The Americans give both
sides money … [B]oth sides are given weapons, communications equip-
ment, intelligence equipment. They have good contacts on both sides; on
both sides are former Taliban supporters. (p. 251)
Even as it announces the quasi-imperial mission in Afghanistan in terms
redolent of Rudyard Kipling and the Great Game, so too the text records
the expediency and double-dealing that undercut the moral absolutes
elsewhere propounded.
For all its apparent objectivity, The Bookseller of Kabul’s deployment of
novelistic techniques takes it beyond the realms of normally accepted journal-
istic practice. Likewise, it is the fruit of a brief visit – as opposed to the lengthy
periods living and working with human subjects, bolstered by years of aca-
demic training, which characterize reputable anthropological endeavors – and
its argument is conducted in precisely the totalizing and moralizing language
criticized by actual anthropologists such as Abu-Lughod. Bookseller advances,
but in the end cannot sustain, its tone of cultural superiority, based as it is on
the unexamined preconceptions of a quite privileged northern European with
access to the means to disseminate them. Abu-Lughod warns: “We should be
suspicious of anyone who asks us to gaze on the sufferings of ‘other’ kinds of
women, as if they are not connected to us and what we do, including our
governments and our financial institutions, and as if those women do not
share any of our humanity.”35 For her, humanity means complexity, and
complexity requires an understanding both cultural and – perhaps more
importantly – historical. It is just this historicity that Neo-Orientalism and
Islamophobia try to screen out.
In the end, Seierstad’s urge to tell the truth results in a conflicted
narrative that on one level replicates the cultural prejudices by which
Muslim countries are homogenized and found wanting. Yet, at the same
time – and through the unwitting effects of its use of novelistic tools such as
omniscience, indirect speech and shifting focalization – it exposes as much
about the priorities and opportunism of Westerners as about those in
Afghanistan for whom war has become a permanent state of mind.
Thus, Orientalism remains alive and well as a conditioning set of
cultural prejudices. Its new variant is distinguished mainly by the recourse
282 peter morey
to a universalized discourse of rights that act as cover for the neo-imperial
agenda – most noticeably the discourse of women’s rights – and by the
contemporary technologies through which it is transmitted. Hamid
Dabashi has posited the exhaustion of Orientalism as an effective system
of knowledge in which the colonizer speaks endlessly and only acknowl-
edges replies that operate within his hegemonic discourse, citing the 2011
Arab Spring as marking the moment when Middle Eastern voices finally
shook off its influence.36 Even with what little hindsight the intervening
years afford, this conclusion seems hopelessly premature. More salient to
our present moment – in which the Brexit vote in Britain has seen a spike
in anti-Muslim hate crime, and the 2016 US presidential election was won
by a candidate running on an explicitly Islamophobic platform – is the
suggestion that something fundamental has shifted in modes of knowledge
production and circulation. Dabashi notes how what he calls “interested
knowledge” is now produced away from academia by bodies such as think
tanks. Such “knowledge” is tailored to the demands of those who commis-
sion it, resulting in a sort of privatization of knowledge leading to a short-
term, disposable product: “fast-knowledge produced on the model of fast
food.”37 Add to this the power of the Internet, where any theory, no matter
how extreme, can take root and find an audience, and you have all the
conditions for that kind of “post-truth” politics recently identified as
marking contemporary democracy: that hodge-podge of rumor, innuendo
and personal grouse with which unscrupulous politicians can build a
support base.38 If there is no longer even the pretence of objectivity in
knowledge production – and if experts are scorned and marginalized – then
the field lies open to demagoguery where the most successful exponent of
politics will be the one who can cater to most prejudices. As Dabashi puts
it, the heterogeneous nature of knowledge production of the last few years
points “to a degenerative meltdown where the Hegemon cannot produce a
single legitimizing idea that in fact sustains any claim to authority beyond
what brute and vile power can generate and sustain.”39 When it comes to
Islamophobia, populist modes of knowledge production and opinion
formation allow open season on Muslims to be declared. The justification
of torture, belief in conspiracies, institutionalized racism, Islamophobic
policies and scapegoating all become legitimated. It may seem counter-
intuitive to end an essay about Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia – two
knowledge systems that have contributed greatly to this predicament – with
a degree of nostalgia for the models of scholarship that played a large role
in their propagation. Yet, the nihilistic anarchy and cutthroat hyper-
individualism threatened by a world governed by devalued information,
Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 283
personalized pseudo-data and normalized distrust can only impact most on
those already marginalized or declared aberrant. The paradigms may
change, but, when it comes to combating Islamophobia, the struggle
must continue.

Notes
1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 21.
2. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, rev. ed. (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 4.
3. Said, Covering Islam, p. xii.
4. Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 2012), p. 30.
5. “Orientalist Feminism” is the coinage of Roksana Bahramitash and refers to
“a modern project and a type of feminism that advocates and supports
particular foreign policies toward the Middle East.” See Roksana
Bahramtiash, “The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist
Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers,” Critique:
Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14:2 (2005): pp. 221–235. I will deﬁne the
other terms here as they are addressed later in the chapter.
6. Åsne Seierstad, The Bookseller of Kabul (London: Virago, 2004). All subse-
quent references are to this edition.
7. Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015).
8. Kumar, Islamophobia, pp. 63–80.
9. Kumar, Islamophobia, p.3.
10. Kumar, Islamophobia, p.154.
11. For details of these professional Islamophobia networks, their funding, and
their leading personalities, see Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How
the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2012).
12. See Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and
Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 151; see also
Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic, September 1990; and
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (London: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
13. Usma Jamil, “Reading Power: Muslims in the War on Terror Discourse,”
Islamophobia Studies Journal 2:2 (2014): pp. 29–42, p. 30.
14. Said, Orientalism, p. 3.
15. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction
(New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 17–35.
16. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).
17. See Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and
Representation after 9/11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
284 peter morey
18. Dabashi, Post-Orientalism, p. 221.
19. Kumar, Islamophobia, p. 44.
20. Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant
to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
21. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 244.
22. Quoted in miriam cooke, “Islamic Feminism Before and After September 11,”
Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 9 (2002): pp. 227–235, p. 235.
23. Cooke, “Islamic Feminism,” p. 235.
24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and
Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 92.
For a consideration of the limitations of Western feminists’ engagement with
other cultures, see also Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes:
Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Williams and Chrisman,
Colonial Discourse, pp. 196–220.
25. Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 86. Other books in the pulp non-ﬁction
subgenre glory in such titles as: In the Name of Honour; Married by Force;
Daughters of Shame; Latifa: My Forbidden Face; and Princess: A True Story of
Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia.
26. See Fatemeh Keshavraz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in
Tehran (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 3.
While this is an important distinction, which would certainly be true of a
text such as Reading Lolita in Tehran – Keshavarz’s main target – in my
reading of Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul I wish to point out how multiple
features of the text actually pull it in different directions at the same time.
27. Dohra Ahmad, “Not Yet Beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American
Popular Literature,” Social Text 27:2(99) (2009): pp. 109–111.
28. Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2018), pp. 95–125.
29. Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars, p. 4.
30. Tim Judah, “The Bookseller of Kabul, the Famous Reporter, and a
‘Defamation’ of a Nation,” Observer, September 21, 2003, www.theguar
dian.com/world/2003/sep/21/books.afghanistan (accessed August 31, 2013).
An initial ruling in 2010 deemed that Seierstad had invaded the privacy of
the Rais family, and negligence was cited. However, this judgement was
overturned on appeal.
31. As Conor Foley pointed out,
The biggest conceptual weakness of Seierstad’s book is that she does not seem to have
understood the absolute centrality of the concepts of “hospitality” and “Namos”
(literally the “status, chastity, purity, virtuousness, and nobleness of female members
of the family”) to Afghan Society. The idea that you could accept someone’s hospitality
and then spy on them to violate their namos is completely shocking and makes a
mockery of all her other claims of insight into the society in which she was living.
Applications of Neo-Orientalism & Islamophobia in Recent Writing 285
Conor Foley, “Bookseller of Kabul Author Can’t Plead Cultural Immunity,”
Guardian, July 30, 2010, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jul/30/
norway-afghanistan (accessed August 31, 2013).
32. Judah, “An International Bestseller.”
33. Amelia Hill, “Bookseller of Kabul Author Asne Seierstad: ‘It’s Not Possible to
Write a Neutral Story,’” Guardian, July 30, 2010, www.theguardian.com/th
eguardian/2010/jul/31/bookseller-of-kabul-interview-asne-seierstad (accessed
August 31, 2013).
34. Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, p. 90.
35. Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women, p. 225.
36. Dabashi, Post-Orientalism, p. x.
37. Dabashi, Post-Orientalism, p. 213.
38. See Alison Flood, “‘Post-truth’ Named Word of the Year by Oxford
Dictionaries,” Guardian, November 15, 2016,
www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/15/post-truth-named-word-of-the-y
ear-by-oxford-dictionaries (accessed 7 December 2016). See also William
Davies, “The Age of Post-truth Politics,” New York Times, August 24, 2016,
www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/opinion/campaign-stops/the-age-of-post-trut
h-politics.html?_r=0 (accessed 7 December 2016).
39. Dabashi, Post-Orientalism, p. 280.
chapter 16

Orientalism and Cultural Translation: Middle

Eastern American Writing
Carol W. N. Fadda

The Legacies of Orientalism

The effects of Edward Said’s analysis of the West’s myopic representations
of the East in his seminal work Orientalism (1978) has had long-lasting
reverberations on Easterners themselves, particularly in the ways they
respond to such Orientalist depictions and rearticulate themselves in the
process. Given the centrality of literary studies to Said’s project of delineat-
ing and analyzing Orientalist thought, this chapter explores the ways in
which literary narratives written by Middle Eastern American writers
navigate stereotypes about Easterners circulated through Orientalist dis-
course. Rather than engaging with Orientalism as a static or unchanging
discourse, however, such literary narratives address what can be described
as the evolution of colonial Orientalist discourse into Neo-Orientalist
representations of Easterners (particularly here Arabs and Muslims), espe-
cially as shaped by twentieth- and twenty-ﬁrst-century imperial and mili-
taristic US projects in the Middle East, starting with the post–Cold War
period up until the present so-called US-led War on Terror.
Said’s emphasis on the centrality of literary and cultural texts in the
dissemination of Orientalist tropes has had a great impact on the develop-
ment of literary studies and the humanities more generally.1 By under-
scoring “the interrelations between society, history, and textuality,”2
Orientalism links the literary and the political in ways that have become
essential for understanding how power, knowledge production and repre-
sentation are closely interconnected. With Orientalism being partly “a
style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction
between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident,’”3 Said’s analysis of cultural and
literary texts by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists and writers
afﬁrms how European colonial countries like Britain and France asserted
their dominance and power by constructing the “inferiority” of the Eastern

286
Orientalism and Cultural Translation 287
Other through essentialist and damaging representations. Such representa-
tions depict the Easterner Other as backward, uncivilized and barbaric,
framed by static and unchanging religious, historical and cultural struc-
tures. Like Said, other scholars have pointed to the ways in which
Orientalist thought is premised on the denigration of the Eastern Other,
with particular attention given to the demonization of Arabs, Muslims and
Middle Easterners more generally.4 The stringent continuation of
Orientalist discourse into the present historical moment, what some scho-
lars refer to as Neo-Orientalism,5 is made evident by pervasive and inter-
secting forms of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia. Arab American
scholars such as Steven Salaita, for instance, argue that anti-Arab racism
is a more apt descriptor of the US mainstream’s pushback against and
denigration of Arabs and Muslims, primarily in the way this term captures
and implicates racial and racist constructions of the Other, most notably as
they occur at the intersections of race, nationality and religion. In other
words, replacing (or at the very least studying) the concepts and practices of
Orientalism, Neo-Orientalism or Islamophobia with the term anti-Arab
racism compels us to “examine how racism alternately informs and
inspires . . . the essentialization or frequent misrepresentation of Arabism
by Americana.”6 Other scholars point to the importance of defining
Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism “to more accurately reflect the inter-
section of race and religion as a reality of structural inequality and violence
rooted in the longer history of US (and European) empire building.”7
It is through such discourse, then, as primarily shaped by the rise of US
power and its imperial reach after World War II, that the Arab and Muslim
Other is deemed antithetical to Western thought and practices, thus
relegated to the realm of the “forever foreign.”8 These depictions serve to
prop up and in turn are themselves substantiated by US imperial logics that
rationalize military and political interventions in the Middle East by
asserting Western cultural and religious superiority. As Nadine Naber
and other scholars have pointed out, US imperial logics construct new
Orientalist discourse through an array of cultural, gendered and religious
narratives. Some of these narratives include, for example, depictions of
Arab and Muslim women, queers and minorities, for one, as in need of
being rescued into Western civilization and away from the “backward”
practices of the Arab and the Middle Eastern world. Whether we want to
label it Neo-Orientalism, Islamophobia, anti-Muslim or anti-Arab/Middle
Eastern racism, it is the shared logics of these outlooks that dictate stereo-
typical representations of Middle Easterners and portray militarism and
violence in the Middle East as necessary and justified, even if they entail the
288 carol w. n. fadda
loss of huge numbers of Arab and Muslim lives, the displacement of
millions from their original countries and the plunging of many Middle
Eastern countries into devastating conflicts.9
Even though Orientalist representations of Arabs permeated US dis-
course well before the 1950s, the neo-imperialist agenda of the United
States after World War II has had major repercussions on Middle
Easterners. The role of the United States in the Middle East since the
1950s has had particular impact on migration movements, exile and dis-
possession. Major crises during the period resulting in such upheavals
include the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Arab–Israeli
wars of 1967 and 1973, the 1970s Arab oil embargo, the 1979 Iranian
revolution and the hostage crisis, the Lebanese war from 1975 to 1990
and its aftermath, the First Gulf War in the early 1990s, the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 respectively, and the ongoing War
on Terror. The geopolitical shifts resulting from such watershed historical
moments have resulted in overwhelmingly negative mainstream represen-
tations of Middle Easterners, ones that are premised on the binary logics of
Orientalist discourse.10 Such stereotypes include representations of Middle
Eastern men as oppressive, violent, fanatic and terrorists and Middle
Eastern women as exotic, oppressed, silenced and lacking in agency.

Imaginative Geographies and Immigrant Passages from

the Middle East
Foundational to understanding and critiquing Orientalist representations
of the Middle East is Edward Said’s discussion in Orientalism of what he
calls the “imaginative geographies” of the Near East. Discussing the power
of colonial and neocolonial histories and practices to produce knowledge
about Muslims and Arabs, Said writes: “For there is no doubt that
imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own
sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is
close to it and what is far away.”11 Such a geographically mediated for-
mulation is relevant here to discussions of how Middle Eastern identities
(whether existing in the Middle East or in the United States) are con-
structed in the US national unconscious.
As I discuss later on in the chapter, the imaginative geographies that the
West (and specifically here the United States) construct of the Middle East
play an important role in shaping Middle Eastern American writers’ work,
especially in their negotiation of the pressures of assimilation, racialization
and in-betweenness to which their communities are subjected. As Leti
Orientalism and Cultural Translation 289
Volpp notes, “American Orientalism historically referenced North Africa,
the Middle East, and Turkey, as well as East Asia. Collectively, and often
indistinguishably, these regions have functioned as the ‘East’ to America’s
democratic and progressive ‘West,’” serving as “phantasmic sites on which
the U.S. nation projects a series of anxieties regarding internal and external
threats to the coherence of the national body.”12 The type of American
Orientalism that developed after World War I was reinvigorated after 9/11,
with the Middle East seen as encompassing what is hegemonically con-
structed “as the barbaric regions of the world that spawn terror.”13 For after
9/11, the “phantasmic” body of Arabs, Middle Easterners and Muslims
(which get all collapsed into a homogenous and indistinguishable entity) is
depicted as infiltrating the US nation’s border, so that what was previously
perceived to occupy esoteric zones “over there” is suddenly recognized as
an alarming and fearsome presence “over here,” in the immediacy of what
is perceived to be a vulnerable USA under attack.
It is important to point out that the Middle East as a geopolitical
category located “over there” (and always juxtaposed with the familiar-
ity – and the safety – of an “over here”) is one that has undergone shifts
and reformulations (depending on colonial outlooks, imperial invest-
ments and national crises). Initially identified in Eurocentric terms as
the geographical area located midway between the British empire and its
colonies in Asia (propagated by the British as well as Americans such as
naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan), the Middle East as a geographical
entity typically encompasses the Levant and the Arabian peninsula and
includes Arab as well as non-Arab countries such as Turkey, Iran and
Israel, while the broader category of the Middle East and North Africa
(MENA) extends to the Arabic-speaking North African countries that
are part of the Arab League. Moreover, the geographical parameters
informing definitions of the Middle East often shift depending on
authorial perspective and historical context. After 9/11, for instance,
the Middle East as a geopolitical category was reconceived and broa-
dened to include countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and
Afghanistan that had previously often fallen outside traditional map-
pings of the Middle East. Ella Shohat and other postcolonial scholars
have rejected definitions that conceive of the Middle East as a “unified
category of analysis.” The challenge, Shohat asserts, “is precisely to avoid
a facile additive operation of merely piling up increasingly differentiated
groups of women, men, or transgenders from different regions and
ethnicities – all of whom are projected as presumably forming coherent,
yet easily demarcated entities.”14
290 carol w. n. fadda
Along with remappings of the Middle East, the period after September
11, 2001, then gave rise in the United States to “the consolidation of a new
identity category that grouped together persons who appear to be ‘Middle
Eastern, Arab, or Muslim.’. . . What has solidified this identity category is a
particular racialization, wherein members of this group have been identi-
fied as terrorists, and disidentified as citizens.”15 In this way, such racializa-
tion redefined the presence of Middle Easterners in the United States as a
recent phenomenon, thus accentuating their homogenous foreignness and
in turn defining their presence as a threat to the nation and to hegemonic
US identities. Moreover, such racialization not only placed Middle
Easterners outside the bounds of US national belonging: it also produced
a mainstream discourse that collapsed the distinctions among the identity
markers Muslim, Arab and Middle Eastern, conceiving them as homo-
genous and threatening in their enactment of national, cultural, religious
and political difference. In attending to the specificities of Middle Eastern
identities in the US, I focus later on in this chapter on Arab American
identities and how they intersect with Muslim and other Middle Eastern
ones. To do so, I highlight how collectives like Arab Americans have
historically engaged with Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist tropes.
Moreover, such a focus undercuts the facile conflation of labels like
Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern to highlight the complex histories and
multiple outlooks and positionalities encompassed by the Arab American
label itself and the ways in which it intersects with other identity
formations.
Rather than being a recent phenomenon, Middle Eastern immigration
to the US in fact dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, with the
different legislative restrictions placed on immigrants allowed to enter the
United States having a direct impact on the makeup and number of
immigrants arriving from the Middle East. Arab immigration, for one, is
divided into roughly three phases: the first one extends from the 1880s to
1924, the year the Immigration Quota Act was passed, which limited the
number of immigrants to the United States based on their nationality. The
end of World War II and the passing of the Immigration and Nationality
Act of 1952 ushered in the second wave of Arab immigration, which lasted
until the late 1960s. The third and last phase, facilitated by the passing of
the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, extends to the current period.16
Other immigrant passages from the Middle East include Iranian immigra-
tion, which started between the late 1940s to the late 1970s, whereby
individuals were traveling to the United States for work or educational
purposes. The second phase of Iranian immigration to the United States
Orientalism and Cultural Translation 291
was prompted by the Iranian revolution in 1979, followed by a third phase,
starting from the mid-1990s onwards.17
Even though the immigration routes and histories of these different
communities are heterogeneous and distinct, the overwhelming erasure of
such specificities and the mainstream’s myopic insistence on lumping
together different groupings and national identities point to the domi-
nance of an overarching national narrative that insists on binaristic defini-
tions of self and other. To resist such binaristic representation and the
conflation of rich and complex identities, I turn to delineate some ways in
which literary and cultural production by Middle Eastern American wri-
ters have served to engage the problematics raised by Orientalist represen-
tations of Middle Easterners as Other.

Diasporic Narratives: Writing Middle Eastern Identities

in the USA
The rise of US political and military power in the Middle East after World
War II has had a direct effect on the formation of Middle Eastern identities
in the United States. Even though Middle Eastern immigration to the USA
dates back to the late nineteenth century, the changes in US immigration
laws and the multiple post–World War II conflicts and wars in several
countries of the Middle East (many of which the United States had a direct
hand in) drove Middle Easterners to emigrate to the USA in increasing
numbers from the second half of the twentieth century onward. In this
way, Middle Easterners in the US, whether immigrants themselves or
descendants of immigrants, have found themselves in a host land that
was often the perpetrator or at least a major player in the conflicts and wars
back in their original home countries. Reflecting a certain diasporic experi-
ence that encompasses dispossession and loss brought about by US imper-
ial and military projects, these communities embody what Nadine Naber
aptly refers to as “diasporas of empire.”18 Defining Middle Eastern com-
munities in the United States as diasporas, and in many cases specifically as
diasporas of empire, complicates their immigrant and/or transnational
experiences and positions them in the context of larger geopolitical factors
that extend beyond a dominant discourse around immigration in the USA,
which often seeks to uphold the construct of the American Dream. Several
bodies of literary and cultural production by Middle Eastern American
writers address the conundrum of being American while also possessing a
sense of transnational belonging to an original homeland that is at best
politically at odds (as in the case of Iran) or at worst the target of US
292 carol w. n. fadda
military invasions and interventions (as in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan,
among other countries in the greater Middle East). This conundrum
brings with it the added burden and responsibility, shared by a majority
of Middle Eastern American writers, of countering, through their cultural
production and their role as community spokespersons, the negative and
Orientalist portrayals of their communal, religious, national and cultural
backgrounds by a mainstream US media.
Of course, the perspective of these writers is far from being uniform, for
they occupy a vast array of positionalities and outlooks that are shaped by
different factors, including national background, ethnicity, gender, racial
self-identification, class and connections to original homelands, as well as
ties to their communities in the United States. Some identify as immi-
grants, having arrived in the USA as children or as adults, or they identify
as exiles, without the ability to access or return to an original homeland.
Others resist being marginalized as hyphenated writers, while even others
challenge the fixity of a US identity, hyphenated or otherwise, by claiming
a shifting transnational, global or migrant identity that exceeds the geo-
graphical and ideological boundaries of a nation-state. Whichever posi-
tionality these writers claim, when writing within and from a US space,
they ultimately succeed in altering the US cultural, literary and even
political landscapes. They do so not merely by virtue of having their voices
included in national conversations about art, literature, politics and knowl-
edge production but more importantly by raising questions about how
American identity is defined and what constitutes American literature and
culture. Yet the ways in which Middle Eastern American writers (who
identify with or lay claim to a “diaspora of empire”) position and articulate
themselves in the United States are far from being uniform. Such diasporas
are widely varied, with different immigration pathways, histories, struggles
and literary lineages, while writers within each Middle Eastern American
community differ in their personal histories and artistic investments.
For instance, Arab Americans have a long history of immigration and
literary output that well precedes the USA’s dominance on the global
political scene post–World War II. By virtue of such long histories, one
cannot refer to a singular Arab American experience, especially given the
various conditions that Arab Americans have faced in the United
States and the shifting approaches to racial, ethnic and national self-
identification, narrative choice and political outlook among Arab
American writers from the first wave of immigration in the late 1880s
onward. The case of Iranian American writings, for instance, follows a
historical and literary trajectory that differs from the Arab American one,
Orientalism and Cultural Translation 293
emanating from a specific history of immigration to the United States that
is primarily shaped by the 1979 Iranian revolution, the toppling of the
Shah, the hostage crisis and the ensuing tense USA–Iran relations.
Moreover, with memoirs being the dominant genre in the inception of
Iranian American literature, more recent efforts focus on highlighting
literary contributions in the field that extend beyond the memoir, includ-
ing fiction, poetry, non-fiction, etc.19 Iranian-American writer Persis
Karim, for one, insists on showcasing in her work “how rich, diverse,
and complex the encounter between Iran and America truly is . . . [and
that] there is no uniform view of Iran or of what it is to be Iranian
American.”20 She has edited numerous anthologies that exemplify such
diversity, with her more recent anthology Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian
American Writers (2013), which she coedited with Anita Amirrezvani,
portraying a wide array of genres and viewpoints to tell “the stories and
people that Iranians left behind after the revolution and those that were
created in the experience of diaspora.” Karim states, “The writing in this
collection reflects a new sensibility, perhaps even a new generation of voices
and a new language,”21 thus pointing to the constantly evolving landscapes
of literary production framing the experiences of different diasporic and
immigrant US communities.22
Even though the denigration and demonization of Arabs, Muslims and
Middle Easterners permeated US discourse and media well before 9/11, the
reductive collapsing of these identities into a homogenous and indistin-
guishable whole after 9/11 (and in the context of the ongoing “War on
Terror”) has shaped strong radical, anti-imperial, anti-racist and feminist
responses by Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern writers in the United
States. Such responses, by challenging the “mistaken identity” discourse
that constructs visible difference in dress, skin color, accents, religious
attire etc. as aspects of a monolithic Muslim and Middle Eastern identity
that denotes foreignness (and therefore un-Americanness), create powerful
narratives of cross-racial, interreligious, intra- and interethnic, and trans-
national solidarities. Such narratives refute binaristic constructs of us vs.
them, here vs. there, turning simplistic reductions that conflate difference
with US unbelonging into a revisionary understanding of Americanness.
Anthologies and edited collections that speak to these kinds of discursive,
activist and anti-Orientalist solidarities include texts like I Speak for Myself:
American Women on Being Muslim (2011), edited by Maria M. Ebrahimji
and Zahra T. Suratwala; Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak
Out (2004), edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan; Middle Eastern Muslim
Women Speak (1977), edited by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Basima
294 carol w. n. fadda
Q. Bezirgan; and Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak
(2005), edited by Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur; among others. Transnational
feminist readings of Middle Eastern, Arab and Arab American cultural
texts can be found in the work of Ella Shohat, Amal Amireh, Nada Elia,
Lisa Majaj, Therese Saliba, Joe Kadi and Sarah Husain, as well as other
feminists whose work is included in the edited volume Arab and Arab
American Feminisms (2010).
Despite such transformative and revisionary texts, the bulk of literary
economies in the United States determining publication selections, mar-
keting of books and readers’ choices are shaped by deeply ingrained
Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist impulses. Such impulses are premised on
limited understandings and depictions of the Muslim and Middle Eastern
woman as in need of being rescued from patriarchal and violent societies in
the Middle East. Such depictions, whether portraying women as victims
living in an oppressive Middle East or as escapees who have successfully
been saved from their culture and religion, are often internalized and
replicated in narratives written by Middle Eastern and Muslim women.
Of course, the book publishing industry has a major role in the success of
such narratives, with the proliferation of these books being shaped by (and
at the same time shaping) a Western and Neo-Orientalist public appetite
for stories that affirm the way in which it imagines and constructs the
Muslim and Middle Eastern Other. In her book Do Muslim Women Need
Saving?, Lila Abu-Lughod writes that these books were “published by trade
presses, reviewed widely, and adopted by book clubs and women’s
reading groups, a lurid genre of writing on abused women – mostly
Muslim – [that] exploded onto the scene in the 1990s and took off after
September 11.”23 Examples of such books include Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel
(2007), The Caged Virgin (2006), Nomad: From Islam to America: A
Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Heretic (2015)
and Because They Hate (2006); Norma Kouri’s Honor Lost (2000), which
turned out to be a hoax; Asra Q. Nomani’s Standing Alone: An American
Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam (2006) and Standing Alone in Mecca:
A Pilgrimage into the Heart of Islam (2013); and many others. The pre-
valence of these books increased after 9/11, driven by a culture of fear on the
one hand and an impetus to justify US military invasions in Afghanistan
and Iraq (as well as the perpetuation of the “War on Terror”) on the other
hand. However, as pointed out by Arab and Arab American feminist
scholars and activists, the narratives offered in these books are direct
continuations of an older Orientalist discourse that pits the West as
morally and culturally superior to backward and barbaric Eastern
Orientalism and Cultural Translation 295
cultures.24 The logics of such discourse often hinge on Arabs and Muslims
themselves affirming such cultural divisions, with what is construed as the
“authentic” voices of the likes of Norma Kouri, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and their
like affirming Orientalist premises. Many other Arab and Muslim
American writers, however, reject such premises, positioning and repre-
senting themselves in direct opposition to the stereotypes depicting them
as perpetual Others. The following section focuses on the ways in which
Arab American writers have further negotiated and addressed Orientalism
and its attendant strategies of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, forging
in the process their positionalities as racialized and minoritized Arabs and/
or Muslims in the United States.

Arab Americans and Literary Representations

Around 3.6 million Arab Americans are estimated to be currently living in
the United States, with the Census Bureau categorizing them (along with
others of Middle Eastern and North African background) as white.25 With
origins in the twenty-two countries of the Arab League, a large majority of
Arab Americans are from the Levant area, which encompasses Lebanon,
Syria, Jordan and Palestine. As already mentioned, Arab immigration to
the United States started in the late nineteenth century and is divided
roughly into three main periods (1880s to mid-1920s, 1950s to 1960s and
1960s to the present). The first wave was dominated by Christian immi-
grants (reaching one hundred thousand by 1914), coming from the
Ottoman provinces of Syria, Mount Lebanon and Palestine and initially
classified as Syrians or even Turks. The waves that followed consisted of
both Muslim and Christian immigrants (with an increased number of
Muslims) fleeing from wars and conflicts in their Arab homelands (includ-
ing the Israeli occupation and the Lebanese war, as well as the wars in Iraq,
among others). These immigrants, with their geopolitical awareness, are
generally less invested in assimilating into the US social and racial struc-
tures (with its privileging of whiteness) and are perceived and treated as
nonwhite in the mainstream national imaginary. Arab American literature
reflects the contexts determining Arabs’ experiences in the United States,
including immigration laws, the pressures of assimilation, and the political
and military role of the USA in the Middle East. The development of Arab
American literature is marked by three distinct stages: an “early” stage
extending between 1900 and 1920, a “middle” stage extending from the
1930s to the 1960s, and a third and ongoing stage starting in the 1970s up
till the present.26 The period starting from the 1990s onward, however,
296 carol w. n. fadda
marks a shift toward different forms of anti-Orientalist Arab American self-
representation, by which Arab American writers have been increasingly
turning to literary and cultural production to situate themselves and their
communities within an increasingly hostile US landscape, challenging in
the process the redeployment of tired Orientalist stereotypes, albeit in the
new political and racial contexts of US empire.
Arab American writers’ attempts to write and rewrite themselves into a US
national landscape insistent on safeguarding Orientalist tropes about the Arab
Other, however, well precede the current and latest stage of Arab American
literature. As Waïl Hassan notes in Immigrant Narratives, “writing in English
has been, for Arab immigrants, always a politically charged translational task,
heavily invested in discourses of cultural identity, and gravid with ethical and
epistemological considerations.”27 Such a task is evident in the works of the
early mahjar writers from the early twentieth century, including Kahlil Gibran
and Ameen Rihani,28 who are recognized as the founders of Arab American
literature. Along with fellow writers from the literary collective Al-Rābita al-
Qalamiyya (or the Pen League), such as Mikhael Naimy, and Elia Abu Madi, ˙
Gibran and Rihani were extremely conscious of their role as disseminators of
knowledge about the Arab world in the United States. Writing in both
English and Arabic, they (along with other writers from that same period
such as Abraham Rihbany) negotiated their role as “cultural translators,”
translating the East to the West and vice versa,29 while “maintain[ing] a
solid transnational outlook in their physical and intellectual negotiations of
Arab and American identities.”30 It could be argued that these writers’
attitudes toward Orientalist discourse did not challenge it per se. Gibran,
for one, often drew on Orientalist stereotypes to self-fashion himself as the
Eastern mystic or sage (while depicting the East through a predominantly
fantastic lens), and Rihani, with his constant transcultural efforts through his
writing and activism to negotiate between the East and the West, often ended
up reaffirming their binaristic construct.31 According to Waïl Hassan,
As cultural translators and members of an embattled minority, Arab immigrant
writers pick their stances toward Orientalism along the discursive spectrum
broadly defined by [scholars like Antoine] Berman and [Lawrence] Venuti:
domesticating (understood as conforming to, and thereby confirming, the
dominant representations of Self and Other, or “East” and “West”) and
foreignizing (challenging readers’ expectations, undermining stereotypes and
idealized self-images, and proposing what Venuti calls reformed models of
cultural identity) . . . [but these strategies are neither] simple . . . [nor] straight-
forward . . . [for] very few writers can be classified with such either/or clarity.32
Orientalism and Cultural Translation 297
Such intersecting “domesticating” and “foreignizing” stances have been
evident not only in the works of first-generation Arab American immigrant
writers in the United States but also in the works of second- and third-
generation Arab American writers. In the period between the 1930s and
1960s, defined as the second phase of Arab American literature, the
predominant articulations of Arab American identities asserted a predo-
minantly assimilative (or domesticating) approach to US culture, as
reflected in the few texts published during this period. These texts include
autobiographical and biographical narratives such as Salom Rizk’s Syrian
Yankee (1943), George Circus (1950), Vance Bourjaily’s Confessions of a Spent
Youth (1960) and William Blatty’s Which Way to Mecca, Jack? (1960). In
many of these texts, most of which are written by children of Arab
immigrants, the urge to be accepted into US culture is informed not
only by a critique of original Arab homelands (albeit one that is sometimes
mixed with yearning and nostalgia) but one that is shaped by a sense of
shame and embarrassment about being Arab.33
Even though, as Hassan notes, it is neither simple nor straightforward to
categorize writers and their works along clear-cut “domesticating” and
“foreignizing” lines, it is nevertheless noteworthy that Arab Americans
generally became more and more politicized in the second half of the
twentieth century (especially after the 1967 Six Day War). This politicized
outlook led to a more entrenched identification with an anti-assimilative
(or foreignizing) Arab American label that ultimately shaped Arab
American literary production in terms of content, perspective and focus.
Such an affirmation of Arab identity and heritage among Arab American
writers that developed in the period between the late 1960s to the 1980s is
exemplified in the works of writers such as Samuel Hazo, D. H. Melhem,
Sam Hamod, Eugene Paul Nassar, Jack Marshall and Joseph Awad. The
continued military and political involvement of the United States in the
Middle East created an additional catalyst for a full development of a
critical Arab American consciousness, one that partly manifested itself in
a full-blown development of Arab American literature from the 1990s
onward.
Such a critical consciousness developed out of an urgent need to respond
to and combat the increasingly negative reactions of a US mainstream
toward Arabs (whether in the USA or in the Arab world), especially, for
instance following the First Gulf War in the early 1990s and the 1993
bombing of the US World Trade Center. Both events resulted in a severe
backlash against Arabs in the United States, which of course reached new
heights after 9/11 and the “War on Terror.” Not all Arab American writers
298 carol w. n. fadda
directly address in their work US–Arab political contexts and the increas-
ing demonization of Arabs and Muslims in the United States. However, it
can be argued that Arab American writers, by virtue of their positionings
within the US racial anti-Arab and Islamophobic structures, are in fact
automatically engaging through their writing with negative, Orientalist
and reductive representations of Arabs, whether addressed directly or not.
In other words, given the entrenched persistence of Orientalist, anti-Arab
and Islamophobic stereotypes permeating the US imagination, the pro-
duction and circulation of Arab American literary texts becomes one way
to directly or indirectly address such restrictive and dangerous
representations.
Such a stance nevertheless places on Arab American writers
what Nada Elia describes as “the burden of representation,” by
which self-identifying Arabs and Muslims are relegated to the role of
spokespersons constantly having to rectify damaging stereotypes and
represent their communities in ways that are legible to a US main-
stream, often at the risk of simplifying and homogenizing Arab and
Muslim identities.34 Rather than turning to individual Arab American
literary texts and writers, then, to pinpoint the ways in which they
translate Arab cultures and undercut Orientalist stereotypes, we can
think of contemporary Arab American literary works as collectively
complicating a dominant discourse about Arabs, a discourse that draws
on the intersecting logics of Orientalism (or Neo-Orientalism), anti-
Arab racism and Islamophobia. The complexity and variety of Arab
American literary themes, foci and representations across different
genres become a way to combat the reductive impulses of a US main-
stream to define Arab and more generally Middle Eastern identities as
the Other. Nevertheless, we can still identify certain themes, topics
and viewpoints developed in various Arab American literary texts that
exemplify the ways in which literature becomes a means for addressing
simplistic and stereotypical representations of Arabs. Such themes and
topics extend, for example, to explorations of religion and more
specifically the articulation of Muslim American identities; the repre-
sentation of war and conflicts in Arab homelands and how they shape
Arab American experiences within the US; and the interrogation and
negotiation of concepts such as home and belonging within transna-
tional as well as translocal US contexts. In the process, complex and
multilayered Arab experiences are portrayed in ways that ultimately
undercut the uniform story that Orientalism narrates about Arabs and
Middle Easterners.
Orientalism and Cultural Translation 299
Intersections of Religion, Nationality and Race in Contemporary
Arab American Literature
The themes of religious and national/transnational identities are explored
in varied and complex ways in Arab American literary production. This
complexity is made evident in the range of strategies, genres, approaches
and perspectives that Arab American writers develop to address and go
beyond Orientalist mandates of representation (us/them, here/there, good/
bad). In the rest of the chapter, I will briefly discuss and give examples of
each of the sample themes I have just outlined (religious identity, wars and
conflicts in original Arab homelands, and US belonging) in order to
elucidate how Arab American literary texts provoke in myriad ways anti-
Orientalist understandings of Arab American identity formations.
As already mentioned, one of the major tenets of Orientalist depictions
of Arabs involves a conflation of Arab and Muslim identities, one that
asserts the backwardness ascribed to what is often described as a violent and
extreme Muslim and Arab culture. A variety of Arab and Muslim American
texts push against such conflations and binaristic thinking, emphasizing
the religious variety of Arab identities as well as the multiplicity of racial,
ethnic and national affiliations among Muslims in the United States. The
works of Syrian American writer Mohja Kahf, for one, assert the complex-
ity and variety of Muslim American identities and the way they intersect
with Arab American ones. In many of the poems included in Kahf’s Emails
from Scheherazad (2003), we repeatedly encounter a speaker confronting
the Orientalist stereotype of the silent and oppressed Muslim (American)
woman. In the poem “Hijab Scene #7” (one in a series of other “Hijab
Scene” poems in Emails from Scheherazad), we encounter a speaker
responding to what can be described as interrogations that question and
undercut her Americanness by virtue of her hijab:
No, I’m not bald under the scarf
No, I’m not from that country
Where women can’t drive cars
No, I would not like to defect
I’m already American (1–5)35
In this and other poems by Kahf, the trope of the hijab becomes an
entryway into questioning hegemonic Western impulses to rescue Muslim
women from the hijab (and the Arab and Muslim cultures that enforce the
hijab). With the speakers’ responses in many of these poems refuting a
mainstream discourse that pits the hijab, and in this case specifically
Muslim American identity, as antithetical to and irreconcilable with
300 carol w. n. fadda
Americanness (read as white and Christian), the speaker resists racialized
and Orientalist depictions of Muslim American bodies that render them
either invisible or reductive. An insistence on depicting Muslim American
identities as neither static nor homogenous is also made evident in Kahf’s
novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), a coming-of-age novel
depicting the protagonist Khadra Shamsi’s negotiation of her Muslim
identity in multiple, transnational, cross-racial and multiethnic contexts.
Even when not handled directly within religious or faith-based frame-
works, Muslim identity is often portrayed in Arab American literary texts
as a point of contention around which the otherness of Arab American
identities is constructed. This becomes evident, for instance, in the works
of playwrights such as Yussef El Guindi, including his plays Back of the
Throat (2006) and Language Rooms (2010), in which the main characters
are rendered automatically suspicious due to their Muslim identity, espe-
cially (but not solely) in the context of a hypervigilant political landscape of
post-9/11 and the “War on Terror.” Similar depictions of Muslim scape-
goating are taken up by Laila Halaby in her novel Once in the Promised
Land (2007), in which a Muslim Jordanian couple, Jassim and Salwa
Haddad, get caught up in the frenzy and paranoia characterizing the strong
Islamophobic impulses permeating the United States, particularly after
9/11.
Another recurrent thematic trope in various Arab American literary texts
involves portraying connections to and experiences of original Arab home-
lands, ones that are often embroiled in conflict and war. Many Arab
American texts in fact are set primarily in an Arab country or in strongly
transnational settings, depicting the realities or lingering effects (and after-
effects) of war within these spaces. Examples of such texts include Etel
Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose (1977); Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of
War (1998) and I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001); and Patricia
Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection (2003), all of which focus on the
Lebanese war (1975–1990) as a traumatic period for Lebanese and Lebanese
Americans. Other texts focus on Palestinian lives within the geographical
contexts of Israeli occupation, such as Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin
(2010), Susan Muaddi Darraj’s A Curious Land: Stories from Home (2016),
Lisa Suhair Majaj’s Geographies of Light (2009), Suheir Hammad’s Born
Palestinian, Born Black (1996) and breaking poems (2008), Naomi Shihab
Nye’s Habibi (1997) and Words under the Words (1994), Deema Shehabi’s
Thirteen Departures from the Moon (2011) and Fady Joudah’s The Earth in
the Attic (2008). The effect that such a thematic focus on war and conflict
in an Arab setting has on upending Orientalist tropes is that it blurs the
Orientalism and Cultural Translation 301
boundaries of “here” (the United States) and “there” (the Arab world) as
well as the binary of “us” and “them” (here specifically Americans and
Arabs), boundaries that constitute one of the central tenets of Orientalist,
Islamophobic and anti-Arab logics. In upending these rigid boundaries,
then, these texts emphasize the fluidity of identities constructed around
race, nationality, gender and religion, emphasizing the multiplicity and
simultaneity of belongings that defy rigid and unchanging conceptualiza-
tions of place and lived experiences. In her poem “First Writing Since,”
written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Suheir Hammad rejects the
ideological rigidity informing the binaristic separation of “here” and
“there” at the heart of Orientalist logics:
if there are any people on earth who understand
how new york is feeling right now,
they are in the west bank and the gaza strip.
... ... ...
over there is over here (91–93; 126)36
By insisting that “over there” is “over here,” Hammad collapses the
emotional and ideological boundaries that separate and hierarchize pain,
trauma and loss into separate and distinct spheres. The replacement of
rigid Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist boundaries with fluid identity for-
mations and transnational configurations of belonging are evident too in
the works of other Arab American writers, including, for instance, the
works of Randa Jarrar, Hayan Charara, Khaled Mattawa, Nathalie Handal,
Laila Lalami, Laila Halaby and Alia Yunis, to name a few. In Jarrar’s novel
A Map of Home (2008), for instance, the young Nidali Ammar learns to
negotiate her multiple identities (Palestinian, American, Muslim,
Egyptian, Greek) through her movement across multiple gendered, racial,
religious and national boundaries and borders. In addition to asserting a
solidly transnational Arab American outlook, a novel like A Map of Home,
as well as the works of the aforementioned writers, trouble simplistic
configurations of US belonging that privilege, if not demand, assimilative
forms and articulations of US identities. In other words, such works, in
addition to challenging binaristic constructs of here/there, us/them, also
reconfigure homogenous and mainstream understandings of US belong-
ing, especially as they pertain to minoritized and racialized communities
like Arab Americans and Middle Eastern Americans more generally.
Such interrogations of dominant forms of national belonging, as
demanded from Arab American communities, are examined in the works
of Joseph Geha, for one, whose book Through and Through (1990) is one of
302 carol w. n. fadda
the first collections of Arab American short fiction. Kahf also showcases in
her work a critique of a mainstream’s assimilative mandate that leaves little
room for the articulation of heterogeneous and interrogative forms of
Muslim and Arab identities. Moreover, the rich heterogeneity of Arab
American identities that cross religious, political, national and generational
divides is showcased in the fiction of Diana Abu-Jaber, whose novels –
including Arabian Jazz (1993), Crescent (2003) and Birds of Paradise (2011),
among others – depict a whole range of Arab and non-Arab characters,
exemplifying the nuances and variety of Arab American experiences and
cultural production.
Needless to say, it would be too simplistic to state that Arab
American or Middle Eastern American literature’s function is to
directly address, denounce or challenge Orientalist tropes. Such a
statement ultimately reduces the multilayered facets of these literatures
to a one-dimensional or didactic cause. However, the ways in which
Middle Eastern American literature intervenes to disrupt or at least lay
bare the reductive portrayals of Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist dis-
course, as well as their attendant ideologies of Islamophobia and anti-
Arab racism, remain important facets of such literary articulations.
Such interventions are complex and, again, multiple, with the end
result being the questioning rather than the affirmation of the binar-
istic thinking at the heart of Orientalist perspectives.

Notes
1. Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard and David Attwell, eds., Debating Orientalism
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 1.
2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 24.
3. Said, Orientalism, p. 2.
4. See Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric
World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Sunaina Maira,
Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009).
5. Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams, “Neo-Orientalism,” in Globalizing American
Studies, eds. Brian T. Edwards and Gaonkar Dilip Parameshwar (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 283–299.
6. Steven Salaita, “Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia,” CR: The New
Centennial Review 6:2 (2006): pp. 245–66, p. 247.
7. Abdul Khabeer Su’ad, et al., “Islamophobia is Racism: Resource for Teaching
& Learning about Anti-Muslim Racism in the United States,” https://islamo
phobiaisracism.wordpress.com/ (accessed October 2, 2016).
Orientalism and Cultural Translation 303
8. Ella Shohat, “Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge: Area Studies, Ethnic
Studies, and Postcolonial Studies,” in Taboo Memories: Diasporic Voices
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 1–16, p. 6.
9. Nadine Naber, “Decolonizing Culture: Beyond Orientalist and Anti-
Orientalist Feminisms,” in Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender,
Violence, and Belonging, eds. Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany and
Nadine Naber (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010), pp. 78–90, p. 81.
10. For an analysis of mainstream representations of Arabs and Muslims in the
United States, see Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a
People (Northampton: Olive Brach, 2001); Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and
Muslims in the Media (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and
Amir Marvasti and Karyn D. McKinney, eds., Middle Eastern Lives in America
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
11. Said, Orientalism, p. 55.
12. Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” in September 11 in History: A
Watershed Moment?, ed. Mary L. Dudziak. (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003), pp. 147–162, p. 152, p. 153. Here Volpp draws on Lisa Lowe’s
discussion of the anxieties projected onto the phantasmic Asian immigrant
body in US national contexts. See Volpp, “Citizen,” p. 161, note 16.
13. Volpp, “Citizen,” p. 153.
14. Shohat, “Gendered Cartographies,” p. 2.
15. Volpp, “Citizen,” p. 147.
16. For more details on Arab American immigration, see Gregory Orfalea, The
Arab Americans (Northampton: Olive Brach, 2006), and Alixa Naff, Becoming
American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1985).
17. For immigration patterns and histories of other populations from the greater
Middle East, including Turks and Pakistanis, see Marvasti and McKinney.
See also John Tehranian, Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern
Minority (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
18. Nadine Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (New
York: New York University Press, 2012), p. 60.
19. Memoirs by Iranian American writers include Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in
Tehran (2003); Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up
Iranian in America (2003) and Laughing without an Accent: Adventures of a
Global Citizen (2008); Tara Bahrampour’s To See and See Again (1999);
Gelareh Asayesh’s Saffron Sky (1999); and Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad
(2005). This focus on the genre of the memoir has been critiqued by scholars
such as Hamid Dabashi and Persis Karim for their covert and often overt
participation in what Karim describes as the Western impulse of “‘rending the
veil’ of Iranian women [that] has been part of the impulse of publishing these
memoirs” (quoted in Wilson). See Dabashi’s essay “Native Informers and the
Making of the American Empire,” Al-Ahram Weekly (June 1, 2006), in which
he critiques Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, calling it a “contemporary case
of yet another attempt at positing English literature yet again as a modus
304 carol w. n. fadda
operandi of manufacturing trans-regional cultural consent to Euro-American
global domination,” http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm. See
also Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2011).
20. Quoted in Sara Wilson, “New Windows into the Iranian American
Experience: An Interview with Anita Amirrezvani & Persis Karim,” World
Literature Today (May 15, 2013), www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/inter
views/new-windows-iranian-american-experience-interview-anita-amirrez
vani-persis-karim (accessed October 2, 2016).
21. Wilson, “New Windows.”
22. Karim’s works include the anthologies A World Between: Poems, Short Stories
and Essays by Iranian Americans (1999) and Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been:
New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006).
23. Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 87.
24. Examples of feminist scholarship that critiques such narratives that depict the
West as a savior of oppressed Arab and Muslim women include Mohja Kahf’s
essay “The Pity Committee and the Careful Reader,” in Arab and Arab
American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging, ed. Rabab Abdulhadi,
Evelyn Alsultany and Nadine Naber (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2010), pp. 104–23. See also Amira Jarmakani, Imagining Arab Womanhood:
The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), in which she analyzes the history of
Orientalist representations of Arab woman in Western discourse since the
turn of the twentieth century.
25. A proposal was put forth for including a Middle East and North Africa
(MENA) category on the US Census for 2020, but was rejected.
26. Evelyn Shakir, “Arab-American Literature,” in New Immigrant Literatures in
the United States, ed. Alpana Sharma Knippling (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1996), pp. 3–18.
27. Waïl Hassan, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in
Arab-American and Arab-British Literature (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011), p. 29.
28. In addition to The Book of Khalid (1911), which is considered to be the first
Arab American novel, Rihani’s prolific literary output in English includes the
poetry collection Myrtle and Myrrh (1905), the play Wajdah (1909), and The
Chant of Mystics and Other Poems (1921). Gibran’s numerous publications
include the much-touted collection The Prophet (1923), written in English and
translated into more than fifty languages.
29. Hassan, Immigrant Narratives, p. 5.
30. Carol Fadda-Conrey, Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational
Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (New York: New York
University Press, 2014), p. 17.
31. See Hassan, Immigrant Narratives, p. 42; see also Geoffrey Nash, The Arab
Writer in English: Arab Themes in a Metropolitan Language, 1908–1958
(Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), for an analysis of Rihani’s literary
Orientalism and Cultural Translation 305
output as exemplifying a bicultural perspective that “foreground[s] the Arab
constituency” rather than an immigrant or US ethnic identity (p. 18). Hassan
affirms Rihani’s US immigrant experience as a central aspect of this writer’s
acts of “cultural translation” (p. 39).
32. Hassan, Immigrant Narratives, p. 37.
33. Lisa Suhair Majaj, “Of Stories and Storytellers,” Saudi Aramco World 56:2
(2005): pp. 24–35, p. 27; Shakir, “Arab-American Literature,” p. 7.
34. See Nada Elia, “The Burden of Representation: When Palestinians Speak
Out,” in Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging,
ed. Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany and Nadine Naber (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 2010), pp. 141–158.
35. Mohja Kahf, “Hijab Scene #7,” E-mails from Scheherazad (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2003), p. 39.
36. Suheir Hammad, “first writing since,” in Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim
Women Speak Out, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan (Northampton: Olive Branch,
2005), pp. 90–94.
chapter 17

New Orientalism and the American Media: New

York Cleopatra and Saudi “Giggly Black Ghosts”
Moneera Al-Ghadeer

It is hard to fathom how a part of the world that produced Cleopatra –

who perfumed the sails of her boat so men would know she was
coming and ruled with elegant authority, signing one tax decree
“Make it happen” – could two millenniums later produce societies
where women are swaddled breeders under house arrest.1
The New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd conjures up the
ancient past in her dramatization of the situation of women in the Arab
and Muslim world, comparing the “swaddled breeders” of the modern era
with an imagined Cleopatra, who “perfumed the sails of her boat” to signal
her arrival in a display of power, seduction and grandeur. Dowd sees
Muslim and Saudi women through Roman and American eyes. Instead
of Julius Caesar or Shakespeare’s Antony, Dowd’s title suggests that it is
Osama bin Laden who escorts the imaginary Egyptian queen as she sails
into the contemporary world. Without the turbulent historical events, the
lure and the betrayal dramatized in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,
the Egyptian queen appears as an unspectacular product of stagey associa-
tive thinking that intends to convey menace.2 The New York Cleopatra is
about to be assailed by Osama bin Laden, the orchestrator of the
September 11 attacks.
Cleopatra, a single fleeting discursive device, engenders uncontainable
associations in Dowd’s op-ed column. Cleopatra is not an unproblematic
figure who can be rendered without the infinitely varying fleet of images
and interpretations of Egypt and the racialized other. The allusion is
baffling in the way that it flows from an archival Orientalist rendering of
the East, its cultures, people and women, always generalized and scruti-
nized to show the urgency of modernizing interventions and imperial
mobilization. Arthur Little, in his Shakespeare Jungle Fever, explains the
Western discursive figuration that we find in Dowd’s description. He
writes: “Simply put, ethnographic allegory represents the culture of an

306
New Orientalism and the American Media 307
Other as a way of redeeming or chastising the self. When the Other is
imported into western mythologies, it functions primarily as a way of
visualizing the chastity of western imperialism.”3 Having failed to distance
the previous association from the American neo-imperial vision, Dowd
exploits common and well-analyzed Western allegory, affirming that the
discourse of Orientalism has not completely vanished. This Orientalist
repertoire acts as an aid to the imagination in moments of conflict,
especially in the context of the volatile conditions of the Middle East in
the twenty-first century. Ironically, the argument Edward Said formulated
in 1978 in his Orientalism opens with a passage in which a French journalist
collapses Beirut with an old portrayed Orient, comparable to Dowd’s series
of descriptions in her 2001 op-ed column: Rome and Egypt, New York and
the Arab world. Said draws the reader’s attention to the relentless theatrical
manifestation of the West on the stage of the East in which it can neither
identify nor perceive itself without its infinite mirroring and appropriation
of the latter. Said underscores the untheorized identification found in the
words of a French journalist: “On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil
war of 1975–1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted down-
town area that ‘it had once seemed to belong to … the Orient of
Chateaubriand and Nerval.’”4 As we shall see, a similar fictional Orient
persists in the representations of the American media, indicating not only
that the West and the East are interdependent but that the fictionality of
the Western view of “the Orient” emerges from tragic events that com-
mand lamentation and appropriation. Said emphasizes the history of this
fictionality: “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been
since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and
landscapes, remarkable experiences.”5 This invented Orient continues to
emerge in the twenty-first century through depictions of violence, injustice
and ruins, but it is also associated with a throng of trivial portrayals that are
devoid of aesthetic value. This reductive imaginary East manifests itself in
the trivialization of women and their causes, especially in Saudi Arabia.6
In recent years, there has been increasing debate centered on the por-
trayal of Arab and Muslim women and prompted by Western media
reporting in conjunction with a reconsideration of the politics of gender
and Orientalism in the neo-imperial era.7 Undeniably, Said’s Orientalism
and the debates it has generated in the new millennium complicate our
discussion of the ways in which the American media describes, mystifies
and sometimes trivializes Arab and Muslim women without understanding
key cultural differences or the formation of gender in the Middle East. In
this essay, I explore the digital assembly initiated by Saudi women and their
308 moneera al-ghadeer
microblogging attempt to destabilize two critical concepts that are impor-
tant subjects of investigation for this volume – American Orientalism and
new Orientalism in social media. In so doing I also examine the relation to
the politics of gender, and I ask, who is the Saudi woman in both spaces?
The first section of this chapter addresses the representation of Saudi
women in the US press, especially in the New York Times and the
Washington Post, and explores how such coverage was intensified after
the Arab Spring in 2011 and during the period of difficult relations between
the United States and Saudi Arabia that arose during the Obama admin-
istration. An argument can be constructed that the new geopolitical order
and the volatile American relation with the Gulf region have affected
reporting about women in the Gulf states, leading to the appropriation
of women as tokens of political pressure and providing a justification for
nondiplomatic interventions, such as military action. By contrast, the
second and third sections of this chapter examine how Saudi women’s
digital assembly and microblogging disrupt the new American Orientalism
and its representational mode of their activism, creating a mirroring
between the misunderstanding they encounter at home and that in the
American media. Both spheres fail to portray the causes these women
advocate for without appropriating them: the local resistance tries to
disavow the causes based on reductive cultural arguments, while the
American media’s depiction conflates them with a long Orientalist reper-
toire of misrepresentations of Arab and Muslim women. At this juncture, it
is necessary to highlight how Edward Said identifies the locus of American
Orientalism in the media, since he thinks that it has replaced the British
novel in the nineteenth century: “Yet before the media go abroad so to
speak, they are effective in representing strange and threatening foreign
culture.”8 He emphasizes: “Historically the American, and perhaps gen-
erally the western, media have been sensory extensions of the main cultural
context.”9 Thus, Orientalist depictions of distant cultures and foreigners
populate the American media discourse, continually reproducing and
recycling the European manifestations of Orientalism as theorized by
Said. Also, he notes the disappearance of the word “imperialism” in the
discussions of the Gulf War and subsequently argues for reading the
American imperialist discourse as it is incorporated and dissimilated in
the media.10 My approach is informed by Said’s argument and extends to
explore an overlooked area of comparative studies, the representation of
Saudi women and their microblogging in the American media.
Alongside the flow of headlines and editorials about oil prices and arms
deals, editorials about the suppression, and the grievances, of Arab and
New Orientalism and the American Media 309
Muslim women are also on the rise in the American media. The extent of
this phenomenon can be seen in the New York Times putting out a call for
Saudi women to get in touch, summoning them via its website and Twitter
in conjunction with the release of a documentary about Saudi women.
This call generated controversial responses and debates in social and
conventional media.11 This surge of interest in women in Saudi Arabia
has led to the publication of a number of studies, including books, articles
and graduate theses that are underpinned by Orientalist propositions.12 Do
we see a more realistic and diverse mode of reporting about the different
faces of Saudi women in the American media that can modify the previous
misperception of Arab or Muslim women, the portrayal of whose condi-
tion urges that they be rescued and saved? Recently, the Saudi woman has
become a protagonist whose narrative has almost identical discursive
characteristics to those found in media stories about Arab and Muslim
women. How frequently after the attacks of September 11, 2001, does the
category of “Saudi women” appear in articles and editorials in the New
York Times and the Washington Post, and to what extent does the media
coverage increase after the Arab spring?
To answer this question, I conducted a LexisNexis search, using the
words “Saudi women” and focusing on dates that were populated by
international crises and protests related to the Middle East. From
September 11, 2001, to April 30, 2003, the Washington Post produced
fourteen articles and the New York Times published thirteen, while from
June 1, 2011, to December 30, 2015, the New York Times published 103
stories and editorials and the Washington Post another 82. A final search
focused on more recent media reporting, from January 1, 2016, until April
30, 2017, and identified twenty-seven articles in the New York Times and a
further nineteen in the Washington Post. The results of these searches
indicate a clear rise, starting with the Arab Spring in 2011, in the
American media’s interest in Saudi women, especially in the wake of
women-led digital campaigning, as I will discuss later in this chapter.
What characterizes most of these editorials are the inextricable links
between Saudi women, oil, premodernization, the Arab Spring and
Western moralism. These values become the yardstick against which
Saudi women are asymmetrically measured.13 Despite the immediate
responses and transnational proximity that the new communication
engendered, I will argue that both the conventional and electronic media
outlets still deploy and incorporate some of the prevalent Orientalist
conceptual framework, which presupposes that women in Saudi Arabia
“are oppressed, discriminated against and kept apart – excluded from many
310 moneera al-ghadeer
of the activities that for men would be normal.”14 Oil and wealth appear to
be utilized to frame and typify women without any nuanced reflection on
the critical cultural and social differences: “All those billions did little to
erase the repression of Saudi women.”15 Granted, restrictions on Saudi
women do exist, but they cannot be taken to describe or present a diverse
society and the wide-ranging experiences of its women, and explaining
these restrictions culturally negates diversity. When unemployment is on
the rise, one cannot identify the problem as a cultural problem, as one
headline suggests: “Limited Female Participation in the Work Force Is
Ingrained in Gulf Culture.”16 What it means to be a woman from Saudi
Arabia is ceaselessly scrutinized, misconstrued and misidentified through
these editorials and the images that accompany them, advancing a very
specific representation of their experiences, predicaments and aspirations.
The attempted unveiling of Arab women, developed during the period
of high imperialism and its Orientalist discourse, recurs time and again in
recent writing and reporting about Saudi women. This can be seen in the
titles of several features, opinion pieces, editorials, op-eds and other inter-
active media postings in the American media.17 Some of these editorials
attempt to “unveil” Saudi women, who are generally presented wrapped in
black in these contexts. “Saudis in Bikinis” is an opinion piece laden with
sensationalist and awe-inspiring adjectives, written by Nicholas Kristof,
one of the New York Times’ most prominent writers.18 The scene in Riyadh
overwhelms the journalist, who struggles to capture what he sees:
On my first evening in Riyadh, I spotted a surreal scene: three giggly black
ghosts, possibly young women enveloped in black cloaks called abayas,
clustered around a display in a shopping mall, enthusiastically fingering a
blouse so sheer and low-cut that my wife would never be caught dead in it.19
Saudi women appear as “giggly black ghosts,” “enveloped in black,” a sight
that can only evoke anxiety and anticipation, despite the caricatured
staging which is conveyed in a rather jocular tone. These apparitions arouse
the imagination by “fingering a blouse so sheer and low-cut” that it is so
revealing that a respectable American woman would not wear it even if
“dead.” Despite their invisibility and the tradition of surveillance by which
they are constrained, the implied promiscuity of the Saudi women here is
reminiscent of Cleopatra the Temptress in Dowd’s op-ed column.20
Editorial titles about the related topic of allowing Saudi women to work
in lingerie shops continue this unveiling process with a play on idiomatic
expressions that are laden with tones of mockery and trivialization: “Saudi
Women Shatter the Lingerie Ceiling” opens by describing the regulation
New Orientalism and the American Media 311
that permits women to sell lingerie as “A SOCIAL revolution” and is
illustrated with a sketch of car keys and a tossed-out bra.21 Similarly, titles
such as “Lingerie Challenges for Saudi Women”22 carry an air of conde-
scension and pose many cultural challenges for a Western readership. The
striking contrast between America and Saudi Arabia always underscores
and reveals a presumed clash between the two worlds: “Saudi Arabia is a
bizarre place. It has McDonald’s restaurants that look just like those at
home except that there is one line for men and one for women.”23 Kristof
adds: “Is it paternalistic of us in the West to try to liberate women who insist
that they’re happy as they are? No, I think we’re on firm ground” (emphasis
mine).24 Kristof fails to truly engage with the reflective mode briefly hinted
at by his fleeting question and instead affirms that people in the West are
indeed liberating Saudi women, even if these women mistakenly claim to
be happy with the way they are. His words clearly convey the neo-imperial
vision and confirm the repression of these women: “I kept asking women
how they felt about being repressed, and they kept answering indignantly
that they aren’t repressed.”25 The representation of women from Saudi
Arabia in the American media relies on, and is enmeshed in, cultural and
moral value judgments. The portrayal that results is not, then, completely
devoid of Neo-Orientalist tropes even though reporters try to capture
something new about Saudi Arabia and its women. These tropes arise,
rather, from a renewed astonishment about what lies within, from the fact
that “[v]isitors to the kingdom are often struck by the weird combination
of modern and pre-modern.”26 When major American newspapers set
forth descriptive formulations about how women are living and struggling
in their other worlds (i.e. worlds that are not like the West), or prescrip-
tions as to how they can be “saved” from their culture, religion and the
“brown men” who oppress them, we still hear the echo of attitudes that
Gayatri Spivak described as being concerned with “white men saving
brown women from brown men.”27 Likewise, Lila Abu-Lughod argues
forcefully that “Western representations of Muslim women have a long
history. Yet after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the images of oppressed
Muslim women became connected to a mission to rescue them from their
cultures.”28
Western media tends to depict Saudi women as invisible, marginal,
suppressed and, more importantly, in need of saving by the West. This
salvific approach is not limited to the language of the media coverage itself
but also appears in many interviews with the academics and experts who
flock to the country for consultancy gigs. In addition to the editorials by its
staff journalists, the New York Times has a flair for quoting scholars and
312 moneera al-ghadeer
experts who tend to trade in metaphors of astonishment and cultural
shock. Harvard Professor Claudia Goldin described her trip to Saudi
Arabia as a science fiction journey, exploiting a metaphor of alienation:
“I think of it as being on ‘Star Trek,’” Goldin writes. “I’m helping another
planet, but I’m having nothing to do with their culture. I’m accepting of
their culture.”29 This othering gesture and conscious alienation combined
with an attempt to accept the foreign culture is clearly shaped by the
Orientalist underpinnings that inform the coverage of Western women
leaders’ visits to Saudi Arabia. Still, the media presents these women leaders
as “modeling liberation,” since they often deliberately choose such a role
for themselves.30 Asma T. Uddin describes an example of this staging:
Prior to her visit, [Theresa] May stated that she would be a role model for
oppressed Saudi women, hoping to inspire these women to consider all that
“women can achieve” and their ability to hold “significant positions.” Her
dress choice was then framed in the context of her statement about empow-
ering “oppressed” Saudi women.31
It is worth noting that these articles are frequently adorned by images,
sketches and cartoons of completely veiled females opening luxurious car
doors, holding the latest phone devices, standing passively next to gold
shops.32 These images display and accentuate a significant contrast between
a highly modernized world, the West, that is clashing with tradition, the
East. This juxtaposition remains one of the most undecipherable cultural
concepts, rendering them incomprehensible to Western audiences.
It is precisely here that female bodies are penned in by this allusive
misconception. Of course, the images discussed provoke a throng of other
associations, such as wealth, invisibility, leisure and mystery. These images
compel the viewer to recall Orientalist pin-ups that have not faded away in
the digital age but stand out as a parody of “Femmes d’Alger dans leur
appartement.”33

Digital Assembly and Women Microblogging

Saudi women blogging and tweeting have engendered a new form of
narration and retelling that tests the limits of postcolonial studies as well
as engages the indispensable attempts to revisit and analyze Orientalism,
such as those pursued in this volume, due to the return of Orientalist
modalities and enduring effects. Women’s microblogging narratives exem-
plify a new form of the political and expand our reading of the non-
Western feminist movement, extending it to include other communities,
New Orientalism and the American Media 313
such as human rights activists and Western media outlets, sometimes
without intending to do so. Digital assemblies transcend the geographical
and generic categories to such a degree that the very idea of a West–East
encounter is called into question, contested and debated in streaming,
tweets, scores of mentions and the American media’s participation.
Arguments, confrontations and accusations occur instantaneously in a
dramatic staging that reaffirms the lingering cultural disconnect between
the American media and Arab audiences on Twitter. How do the American
Orientalist representations of Saudi women in print media outlets differ
from the portrayals of their cyberspace microblogging? How do Saudi
women form assemblies? The lack of street or organized assemblies in
which to voice one’s resistance or protest has compelled women to seek out
new and uncharted spaces that are democratic and open to everyone,
regardless of class, gender or political orientation. Digital spaces offer the
freest platform to scream, call for a protest or gather at a hashtag, the
symbol that links tweets and speakers together, assembling interactive
narratives of abuse, protest and demands for legislative reform. Judith
Butler addresses the fact that the street may not be available for assembly
or mobilization: “So the street cannot be taken for granted as the space of
appearance, to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase, the space of politics, since
there is, as we know, a struggle to establish that very ground.”34 Butler’s
articulation of the notion of the street and the formation of assembly can be
read in relation to the virtual streets that Saudi women enter and occupy as
a platform for the discussion and destabilization of sociopolitical and legal
limitations and as a place from which to call for legislative interventions.
Butler writes: “So the street is not always the site that we can take for
granted as the public ground for certain kinds of public assemblies.”35 For
women in Saudi Arabia, the street is almost the space that cannot be
occupied or populated by any assembly. Instead, digital networks turn
into the virtual gathering space that allows women to evade political and
social restrictions. Restriction and gender segregation are no longer the
defining boundaries of how women mobilize or voice their protests or
grievances. Butler highlights the fact that the street, as a public space, may
not exist: “Of course, we have to consider as well that some forms of
political assembly do not take place on the street or in the square, precisely
because streets and squares do not exist or do not form the symbolic centre
of that political action.”36
Digital activism took off in Saudi Arabia with a campaign that began as a
Facebook post and a hashtag on Twitter, starting the first digital assembly,
Women2Drive, on June 17, 2011. This was followed by another campaign
314 moneera al-ghadeer
launched on Twitter, Oct26Driving, in 2013.37 These attempts at digital
mobilization in support of women driving continue to this day and, at the
same time, encourage other forms of online activism to emerge. These
women activists are digital natives and are aware of the effect of hashtag-
ging and the power that they have achieved in support of several causes
after the first campaign, reaching “Trending Topics” on Twitter in Saudi
Arabia on a number of occasions.38 Likewise, women activists realize the
power of going viral and trending on Twitter, not only for reaching their
target audiences but also for mobilizing the international media and
international organizations, from which they came to distance themselves
in order to avoid appropriation and the spreading of misconceptions.
Online deliberation, advocacy and mobilization characterize these digital
assemblies. Philip Tschirhart describes this “blogosphere, as a public sphere
of deliberation, [which] facilitates a forum for dialogue and discourse pre-
viously denied to women’s emerging perspectives.”39 The restricted public
sphere available to Saudi women, along with the many state-mandated and
conventional restrictions placed on women, are increasingly manipulated
and exploited by political and religious authorities, who instigate countless
heated debates and discussions.40 Women are aware of the multidimensional
trap they are caught in and are compelled to confront and challenge their
traditional confines. By mid-2016, Saudi women’s rights advocates
had started another digital assembly to end the system that
prevents women from making decisions without the permission of their
male guardian – identified by the law as a father, husband, brother or even a
son. They began tweeting under Arabic and English hashtags, such as
#StopEnslavingSaudiWomen and #TogetherToEndMaleGuardianship.
Digital activism has evolved since the Women2Drive campaign and has
come to encompass many different causes. Digital activists advocate for
women’s rights to vote, to travel alone and to have authority over their
bodies without the permission of the male and state guardianship systems.
Each of these campaigns has generated local and international media cover-
age along with a prominent presence on Twitter. It is at these political and
legislative frontiers that Saudi women have organized and intensified their
activism, which attempts to subvert Orientalist media tropes and
preconceptions.
The formation of digital assembly functions as a call for solidarity that is
absent in other physical and social spaces and becomes a site for contesting
Western media reporting as well as for the virtual engagement with Saudi
society, which often triggers confrontations and attacks.41 A mis-encounter
occurs between the international media perception and the local reactions:
New Orientalism and the American Media 315
the American media staging does not exhibit an understanding of the
complexity of cultural and gender implications while, at the same time,
the local virtual resistance displays its own opposition to gender. At times
the public sphere has correlated with the blogosphere, and at others they
have been disintegrated. It is in the space between these binaries that
subversion operates. Women are aware of this reality, which pushes them
to fight on so many fronts: claiming their rights, defending their causes
against accusation, warding off hateful speech and distancing themselves
from any Western ties, especially after the appropriation of their first
digital campaign, Women2Drive. Thus, women find themselves con-
stantly framed by misconceptions that force them to negotiate, translate
and clarify what they are campaigning for. Philip Tschirhart claims that
“[t]he emerging Saudi Arabian feminist perspective is most reflective of the
Islamist feminists,” which overshadows other liberal and secular feminist
discourses that are charting their way in the blogosphere.42 For women’s
digital assembly, Twitter becomes a textual gathering space in which a live
feed of tweets conveys, describes and reports many events that are devel-
oping by the second. The topics might be domestic violence, a case at the
court, an arrest or a travel ban, all of which are monitored by many tweeps
on connected, vigilant screens in Saudi Arabia and ultimately around the
world. The participants in these digital assemblies are witnessing, report-
ing, warning and mobilizing, which makes their tweets into hypertexts
situated somewhere between the genres of the detective story and the
slasher film. The role of digital media in organizing the mobilization of
women cannot be denied. However, its role in setting off a transformative
change has been widely contested.
The first digital assembly, the Women2Drive campaign that began
on June 17, 2011, coincided with the Arab Spring movements in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, generating debates identified with
progressive discourse and the movement toward women’s liberation as
reported in the New York Times and the Washington Post.43 Directed
to young women of middle-class backgrounds and those who asso-
ciated themselves with a cultural elite, Women2Drive attempted
to depoliticize the movement and soon after to distance themselves
from Western press coverage in order to avoid social repercussions,
state sanctions and imprisonment. Rather than uncritically
adopting the pre-digital era construct of a political movement,
Women2Drive – like the Arab youth in their conceptualization of
reform – demanded change and criticized the traditional views and
assumptions that characterized the debates about women and divided
316 moneera al-ghadeer
the public sphere into binaries: conservative and liberal, secular and
religious, or West and East.44

Social Media and the New American Orientalism

Can we argue for another, distinct, Orientalism in social media? Do the
twentieth-century Orientalist images of Arab women migrate to cyber-
space and, if they do, are they presented and viewed differently there than
they are in print media? What type of contradictions do we find in the
presentation of images of Saudi women as, on the one hand, deprived of
their rights yet, on the other, able to speak up and mobilize to improve
their condition? I do not want to advance a generalized argument about the
recasting of Orientalism in social media or to claim that the concept can be
discussed interchangeably across different types of media. Rather, I seek to
call attention to the transfer of the Orientalist mode to the digital sphere
and to the growing presence of those who are classified as others, respond-
ing to and refuting the engendered misconceptions. A key difference is that
Saudi women are present, active and forcibly visible in the virtual space,
and this is in contrast to their lack of presence in the print media, in which
they are spoken about and defined by others who pass off their own
assumptions in place of direct knowledge. Comparing the two media
approaches reveals that women’s advocacy is frequently subjected to
appropriation and misreading and faces disruption, attack, accusations
and mockery.45 This implies, of course, that the resemblance between the
output of the American media, on the one hand, and the online resistance
to Saudi women’s digital assembly at home, on the other, rests on the fact
that women are misconceived by both groups, paradoxically destabilizing
their advocacy for reform or change. More specifically, the ways in which
editorial titles induce vulnerability and reliance on the West as emancipa-
tor are underscored and mediated through clear commanding statements
or descriptive generalizations that tend to cause negative reactions from
readers in Saudi Arabia: “We want to hear from Saudi women about their
lives, aspirations and views on Saudi society”;46 “‘I Live in a Lie’: Saudi
Women Speak Up.”47 These are just a few examples of titles predicated on
emancipatory fervor and the collapsing of the conditions of Saudi Arabian
women with Western values and ideals that continues to mark the digital
sphere. The New York Times posted a tweet highlighting its success in
receiving women’s stories and this was re-tweeted, “liked” and mentioned
by thousands of readers: “We asked women in Saudi Arabia to tell us about
their lives. Thousands responded.”48 Such a tweet has generated what can
New Orientalism and the American Media 317
be described as a digital cultural conflict that contrasts Arab and Islamic
values with Western norms about gender. The responses to this tweet
exemplify the cultural chasm between the American media and its readers
in Saudi Arabia, demonstrating a clear misunderstanding of the diversity
and complexity of each society as well as of gender roles.
The reincarnation of Orientalist rhetoric that has pervaded and altered
the new Orientalist discourse since 9/11 has restaged portraits of a vulner-
able Saudi woman in an American media fraught with similar clichés that
typify the depiction of Arab and Muslim women. One needs a conceptual
grasp of the geopolitical order to see the critical influence that the US–
Saudi relationship has had in engendering a new Orientalist modality in
the treatment of Saudi women, as can clearly be seen in relation to the New
York Times and the Washington Post.49 This type of reporting recycles the
inability of the media to come to terms with the diversity of Arab and
Muslim women, presenting a challenge not only to postcolonial and
gender studies but also to our understanding of global communication
and comparative cultural debates in general.

Notes
1. Maureen Dowd, “Liberties; Cleopatra and Osama,” New York Times,
November 18, 2001, p. 13.
2. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995).
3. Arthur L. Little, Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-visions of Race,
Rape, and Sacrifice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 4.
4. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 1.
5. Said, Orientalism, p. 1.
6. See Moneera Al-Ghadeer, “Cannibalizing Iraq: Topos of Orientalism,” in
Debating Orientalism, eds. David Attwell, Anna Bernard and Ziad Elmarsafy
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 117–133.
7. In the context of this discussion, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Orientalism and
Middle East Feminist Studies,” Feminist Studies 27:1 (Spring 2001): pp. 101–
113. Also, see Deepa Kumar, “Heroes, Victims, and Veils: Women’s
Liberation and the Rhetoric of Empire Post 9/11,” Forum on Public Policy:
Journal of the Oxford Roundtable (2008): pp. 23–32.
8. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993),
p. 353.
9. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 357.
10. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 357.
11. Mona El-Naggar, “‘I Live in a Lie’: Saudi Women Speak Up,” New York
Times, October 28, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/world/middleeast/s
audi-arabia-women.html?_r=0 (accessed March 13, 2019).
318 moneera al-ghadeer
12. A recent study devotes a chapter to “Driving While Female: Protesting the
Ban on Women Driving.” See Loring M. Danforth, Crossing the Kingdom:
Portraits of Saudi Arabia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). Also,
consider Smeeta Mishra, “‘Liberation’ vs. ‘Purity’: Representations of Saudi
Women in the American Press and American Women in the Saudi Press,”
Howard Journal of Communications 18:3, (2007): pp. 259–276.
13. The link between women and oil prices is highlighted in media reporting
on Saudi Arabia. See Yu-Ming Liou and Paul Musgrave, “Here’s Why
Saudi Arabia Is Loosening Its Restrictions on Women: Check the Oil
Prices,” Washington Post, June 27, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/
monkey-cage/wp/2016/06/27/heres-why-saudi-arabia-is-loosening-its-res
trictions-on-women/?utm_term=.f5d8da2dc51d (accessed March 13, 2019).
14. Macfarquhar, Neal, and Robert Mackey, “Saudi Women Defy Driving Ban,”
New York Times, June 17, 2011, https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/1
7/saudi-women-protest-driving-ban/ (accessed March 13, 2019).
15. See Colbert I. King, “Saudi Arabia Is No Friend to the United States,”
Washington Post, May 29, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/saudi-
arabia-is-no-friend-to-the-united-states/2015/05/29/64f24bac-0588-11e5-8b
da-c7b4e9a8f7ac_story.html?utm_term=.60140be9fe5b (accessed March 13,
2019). Also, consider Vongai Mlambo, “Western Discourse on Saudi
Women Ignores Cultural Differences: How Can We Navigate the
Tension between Universalism and Cultural Relativism?,” Gazelle,
November 19, 2016,www.thegazelle.org/issue/100/commentary/nyt-saudi-
women (accessed March 13, 2019).
16. Sara Hamdan, “Saudi Arabia Signals Openness to Women Seeking Work,”
New York Times, September 6, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/world/
middleeast/saudi-arabia-signals-openness-to-women-seeking-work.html
(accessed March 13, 2019).
17. For a theoretical analysis of the unveiling of Arab women as a colonial motif,
see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. M. Godzich and W. Godzich
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). This recurring interest in
veiled Arab women can also be seen as “a metaphor for the mystery of the
Orient itself, which requires a process of Western unveiling for comprehen-
sion.” See Ella Shohat, “Gender in Hollywood’s Orient,” Middle East Report
162 (1990): pp. 40–42, www.merip.org/mer/mer162/gender-hollywoods-ori
ent (accessed March 13, 2019).
18. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Saudis in Bikinis,” New York Times, October 25, 2002:
p. A35, www.nytimes.com/2002/10/25/opinion/saudis-in-bikinis.html
(accessed March 13, 2019).
19. Kristof, “Saudis in Bikinis.”
20. Of course, Kristof’s description of Saudi women recalls the seduction of the
Egyptian queen: “Cleopatra is the great harlot, mistress to three kings, the
Apocalyptic harlot,” cited in Yashdip S. Bains, Antony and Cleopatra: An
Annotated Bibliography (Routledge, 1998) p. 124, note 448. See also statements
such as “Muslim women are oppressed,” which is a stereotype as misleading as
New Orientalism and the American Media 319
“Western women are promiscuous” and tends to create the divide without
understanding the cultural ramification. See Sakdiyah Ma’ruf, “Want to Talk
about Oppressed Muslim Women? Let’s Talk about Kendall Jenner First,”
Sydney Morning Herald, November 16, 2016, www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/ne
ws-and-views/opinion/sakdiyah-maruf-how-to-spot-a-muslim-20161115-gspo
h0.html (accessed March 13, 2019).
21. The editorial displays a sense of bewilderment and moves to a capitalist
comparison of lingerie brands in the United States, deploying the same
approach of measuring social conditions and women’s experiences in Saudi
Arabia against those in the West. See Thomas W. Lippman, “Saudi Women
Shatter the Lingerie Ceiling,” New York Times, January 21, 2012,
www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/sunday/saudi-women-break-a-bar
rier-the-right-to-sell-lingerie.html (accessed March 13, 2019).
22. Donna Abu-Nasr, “Lingerie Challenges for Saudi Women,” Washington Post,
November 3, 2002, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/11/03/li
ngerie-challenges-for-saudi-women/3c72291a-f336-44fa-b1a2-90f0c8b4d427/?
utm_term=.bfcf4bbb99cf (accessed March 13, 2019).
23. Kristof, “Saudis in Bikinis.”
24. Kristof, “Saudis in Bikinis.”
25. Kristof, “Saudis in Bikinis”.
26. Consider Ignatius’ opinion article, which sets out the binary opposition
between the modern and the premodern, as represented by Bedouin tradi-
tion. He writes: “These Saudis might wear Bedouin robes, but their hearts
often seem to be in the West.” See David Ignatius, “A 30-year-old Saudi
Prince Could Jump-start the Kingdom – or Drive It off a Cliff; Mohammed
bin Salam Has a Bold Vision for the Kingdom. Can He Pull It off?”
Washington Post Blogs, June 29, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/
global-opinions/a-30-year-old-saudi-prince-could-jump-start-the-king
dom–or-drive-it-off-a-cliff/2016/06/28/ce669a3e-3c69-11e6-a66f-aa6c1883
b6b1_story.html?utm_term=.66ccbf50afc5 (accessed March 13, 2019).
27. G. C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, eds. C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988), pp. 271–313, p. 296.
28. See Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 6–7.
29. Dionne Searcey, “A Conundrum for Saudis: Women at Work,” New York
Times, November 28, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/11/29/business/a-conun
drum-for-saudis-women-at-work.html (accessed March 13, 2019).
30. For a response to the holding up of Western women leaders as role models
for Saudi women, see Asma T. Uddin, “Theresa May Is no Feminist Hero.
Her Decision Not to Wear a Headscarf in Saudi Arabia Was Not Brave,”
Washington Post Blogs, April 7, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/ac
ts-of-faith/wp/2017/04/07/theresa-may-is-no-feminist-hero-her-deci
sion-not-to-wear-a-headscarf-in-saudi-arabia-was-not-brave/?utm_
term=.1d58139ea6f8 (accessed March 13, 2019).
320 moneera al-ghadeer
31. Uddin, “Theresa May.”
32. Rod Nordland, “Cellphones in Hand, Saudi Women Challenge Notions
of Male Control,” New York Times, April 21, 2017, www.nytimes.com/20
17/04/21/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-women-male-guardianship-acti
vists-social-media.html (accessed March 13, 2019). Other photographs
show women awkwardly sitting in or standing in front of luxurious cars.
Examples include Neil Macfarquhar and Dina Salah Amer, “In a Scattered
Protest, Saudi Women Take the Wheel,” New York Times, June 17, 2011,
www.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/world/middleeast/18saudi.html?action=cli
ck&contentCollection=Middle%20East&module=RelatedCoverage&reg
ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article (accessed March 13, 2019). See the photo
in Ben Hubbard, “Saudi Women Rise Up, Quietly, and Slide into the
Driver’s Seat,” New York Times, October 26, 2013, www.nytimes.com/20
13/10/27/world/middleeast/a-mostly-quiet-effort-to-put-saudi-women-in-
drivers-seats.html (accessed March 13, 2019). Similarly, cartoons and
sketches convey themes of mockery and concealment of Saudi women
and their causes. See Patrick Chappatte, “Cartoon: Saudi Arabian
Roadblock,” New York Times, December 15, 2015, www.nytimes.com/
2015/12/15/opinion/cartoon-saudi-arabian-roadblock.html (accessed
March 13, 2019). Also, see the sketch of an entirely veiled woman
whose eyes are showing a country landscape: Farzaneh Milani, “Saudi
Arabia’s Freedom Riders,” New York Times, June 12, 2011, www.nytim
es.com/2011/06/13/opinion/13Milani.html (accessed March 13, 2019).
33. See Djebar’s reading of Delacroix’s painting Femmes d’Alger dans leur apparte-
ment in Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. Marjolijn de
Jager (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992).
34. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 127.
35. Butler, Notes, p. 126.
36. Butler, Notes, p. 126.
37. Kay Hardy Campbell created a blog, “Saudi Women Driving,” to document
international news, reports, and any development relevant to the topic,
starting from December 12, 2009. The name of the blog is suggestive, as it
asserts driving. See http://saudiwomendriving.blogspot.com (accessed March
13, 2019).
38. The young generation in Saudi Arabia is in command of digital literacy and
has adapted to the use of non-traditional media. See “Social Media in Saudi
Arabia: A Virtual Revolution,” Economist, September 13, 2014,
www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21617064-why-social-me
dia-have-greater-impact-kingdom-elsewhere-virtual (accessed March 13,
2019).
39. Philip Tschirhart, “The Saudi Blogosphere: Implications of New Media
Technology and the Emergence of Saudi-Islamic Feminism,” CyberOrient
8:1 (2014), www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8864 (accessed March 13,
2019).
New Orientalism and the American Media 321
40. See Naomi Sakr, “Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Rhetoric,
Reductionism and Realities,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 35:3
(2008): pp. 385-404. Sakr “examines the process of renegotiating women’s
personal and political status in the kingdom as it has been played out in recent
years in the Saudi media.”
41. What women confront is another resistance in the form of hate speech, which
attempts to disparage women, halt their liberationist efforts, and bring
women to the position of subjection discursively. At such a point, women
recognize that hate speech is directed at them to undermine their digital
lobbying, compelling them to develop discursive strategies to avert aggression.
Hateful messages, name-calling, and the harassment of women activists
online, as well as the consequences that follow, require a separate discussion.
42. Philip Tschirhart, “The Saudi Blogosphere,” p. 6.
43. Women driving attracted international media coverage, especially in the
American newspapers. See, for example, Mackey and Macfarquhar, “Saudi
Women Defy Driving Ban”; Isobel Coleman, “Women’s Driving Protest May
Signal Changes in Saudi Arabia,” Washington Post, June 24, 2011, www.washing
tonpost.com/opinions/womens-driving-protest-may-signal-changes-in-saudi-ara
bia/2011/06/23/AGNwOZjH_story.html?utm_term=.b8c92e159589 (accessed
March 13, 2019). Women2Drive was characterized as a protest in the American
media, generating a backlash against women who drove their cars. See Max
Fisher, “Saudi Women Set to Drive in Protest – and to Show Their Rising
Clout,” Washington Post, October 25, 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wo
rldviews/wp/2013/10/25/saudi-women-set-to-drive-in-protest-and-to-show-their-
rising-clout/?utm_term=.94cd01fe829f (accessed March 13, 2019). For extensive
documentation of the Western media coverage of Saudi women driving, see Kay
Hardy Campbell, “Saudi Women Driving,” http://saudiwomendriving.blog
spot.com (accessed March 13, 2019).
44. In a footnote, Amélie Le Renard captures the event: “In 1990, 47 women
drove in Riyadh, challenging a social norm prohibiting female drivers. Since
then, a fatwa and a law have forbidden women from driving.” See Amélie Le
Renard, “Only for Women: Women, the State, and Reform in Saudi Arabia,”
Middle East Journal 62:4 (Autumn 2008): pp. 610–629, www.jstor.org/stable/
25482571 (accessed March 13, 2019).
45. “Over the past few days, the hashtag # (#IwilldrivemycarJune15th) has
trended across social media, scoring tens of thousands of mentions on
Twitter and other platforms, according to BBC Arabic.” See Adam Taylor,
“A Social Media Campaign to Get Saudi Women Driving Finds Support but
also Mockery,” Washington Post, May 11, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/n
ews/worldviews/wp/2016/05/11/a-social-media-campaign-to-get-saudi-wome
n-driving-finds-support-but-also-mockery/?utm_term=.101a79807a32
(accessed March 13, 2019).
46. “How Has Your Life as a Saudi Woman Changed?,” New York Times,
October 21, 2016,
322 moneera al-ghadeer
www.nytimes.com/2016/10/22/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-women.html?
smid=tw-nytimesworld&smtyp=cur (accessed March 13, 2019).
47. Mona El-Naggar, “I Live in a Lie: Saudi Women Speak Up,” New York Times,
October 28, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/world/middleeast/saudi-ara
bia-women.html?_r=0 (accessed March 13, 2019).
48. See tweet posted on November 1, 2016, which deserves another discussion
because of the conflicting ideas it engendered: https://twitter.com/nytimes/
status/793209947127439363?lang=en (accessed March 13, 2019).
49. See F. Gregory Gause III, “The Future of U.S.–Saudi Relations: The
Kingdom and the Power,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2016,
www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-06-13/future-us-saudi-rel
ations (accessed March 13, 2019). Also, consider C. Chanin and F. G. Gause
III, “U.S.–Saudi Relations: Bump in the Road or End of the Road?,” Middle
East Policy 10:4 (2003): pp. 116–125.
chapter 18

On Orientalism’s Future(s)
Anouar Majid

As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Edward

Said’s Orientalism, it seems, to me, at least, that the postcolonial urgency
its thesis engendered has long been overshadowed by global transforma-
tions that have scrambled the geography of oppression. The Chinese have
already acquired significant chunks of Hollywood, one of the major
producers of Orientalist images;1 the skylines of certain oil-rich Arab cities
are dwarfing the aging ones in Manhattan and Chicago; the best soccer
teams in the world are sponsored by Arab sheikhs; and every human being
on earth covets an American or West-European lifestyle. Middle Eastern
and African refugees, like their Mexican and Latino counterparts, are
gambling with their lives, choosing between barbarism at home or a life
of hope in the West. Said may have objected to Karl Marx’s support of
British imperialism in India, but Marx knew (through readings immersed
in an Orientalist mindset, Said would complain) that the archaic customs
of that country were impediments to the kind of freedom he imagined and
only served the deeply patriarchal and oppressive agenda of the local ruling
class. Not that Marx had any affection for imperialism or capitalism, but he
knew that no precapitalist order could seriously withstand the revolution-
ary powers of capitalism and that a better future for all of humanity can
only come into existence under hitherto unknown socio-economic
conditions.2
Said’s objection to Marx, in fact, highlights the ideological flaws of his
theory and explains, to a large and heartbreaking degree, the current
impasse the world of the presumed “Orientals,” or postcolonial subjects
(a category that, of course, includes me and may include a few of the
contributors to this volume), find themselves in today. Whether a post-
colonial transplant in the West is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, university
professor, world-renowned novelist (like Salman Rushdie) or prosperous
professional, we know that we owe our success to the efficient and reward-
ing systems of the West, not to the dysfunctional institutions of our native
countries. Given his exceptional Palestinian background and his equally

323
324 anouar majid
unusual privilege, Said may have experienced his homelessness somewhat
differently from other unremarkable postcolonials in the West, but his
theory has become so entrenched that it has turned into the default sign of
bien pensant academics and intellectuals. Said’s Orientalism acts as a false
redemption mechanism for those of us who benefit from the West’s
largesse and still feel obligated to stand up for the subalterns left behind.
To me, Orientalism was part of a protest movement against the West’s
arrogant overreach, a concept that was redefined and popularized by a man
schooled in the best cultural ways of the imperial West. Edward Said went
to great and not infrequently exaggerated lengths to show us how the
Orient is a Western fabrication, a discursive trope that has disempowered
Orientals and left them without agency on the stage of history. It’s hard to
disagree with this thesis, albeit Said’s limited focus impelled me to expand
the notion into one of post-Andalusianism, a title I had proposed to my
publisher but, since it didn’t exist in the English language, ended up in the
subtitle of Freedom and Orthodoxy,3 a book that enlarges the scope of the
West’s encounter with the Other to the late fifteenth century, even though
the clash of civilizations (a misnomer that nevertheless captures a historical
truth), stretching back to the mists of time, is an inexorable fact of human
history.
Let us then say that Said’s protest is well justified, that Western scholars
have no moral right to misrepresent Orientals in order to allow mal
pensants imperial governments to act on them with impunity. And even
if allowing that such a nefarious scholarly activity had always been the
norm, that Western scholarship was always deployed for conquests and
domination, we are not any more enlightened by such discovery, since the
cultures and religions that have come to be associated with the West today
(such as Christianity) have always been at war or, at the very best, in a state
of low-intensity conflict with Islam.
Robert Irwin was right when he opened his book Dangerous Knowledge:
Orientalism and Its Discontents by reminding readers of this often-forgotten
fact. There had been mutual respect, even admiration, between West and
East (such as the Greeks and Persians), acknowledgements of debt to the
superior Egyptian or Phoenician civilizations, and frequent interaction
between these civilizations. But the emergence of Islam in the seventh
century and its aggressive, expansionist ambitions also led to a conflict that
is with us still. Islam was seen as a heresy, Mohammed as a false prophet,
and when Europeans learned Arabic, they did so to understand – and
eventually defeat – this conquering religion. Inspired by the fabulous riches
of Asia, the wonders of Egypt or the never-ending menace of Islam,
On Orientalism’s Future(s) 325
Europeans undertook the study of ancient languages, deciphered dead
ones, translated the Quran and literary classics, published the first ency-
clopedia of Islam, invented what we now call Islamic studies, printed in
Arabic script – the list goes on. If this is Orientalism, as defined by Said, it is
unquestionably of a kind that has enriched us immensely.4
By the time Europeans occupied the region in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, they had a far better understanding of the region’s
history than its inhabitants, toiling as they were in the same general
environment of “Oriental despotism” Marx condemned. Even the Arab
nationalism that emerged to fight colonialism was the West’s poisoned gift
to a people who had never thought of themselves as Arabs. What Edward
Said may have done is give a language to people who feel oppressed by the
superiority of Euro-Americans and to our colleagues in the academic
professions who sympathize with the West’s Others. Said, who by virtue
of his upbringing and education may be closer to the Orientalists he
condemns than to the downtrodden he presumably defends, has managed,
in a brilliant literary coup, to reify his own struggles with the issues of
Palestine into a global theory that has ensnared generations of scholars and
militants, including those in the Arab-Muslim world, the sphere of his
native culture.
It is this Arab-Muslim sphere that will be my focus as I think about the
futures of Orientalism, since the Other is too broad a metaphor to ground
our thinking in the concrete here and now. The question, one that is
arguably of pressing importance today, is what to do with Said’s theory as
we try to act on an unstable present and decipher the outlines of an elusive
future. Is Orientalism helpful in finding a workable formula for the
emancipation of Arabs and Muslims, or is Marx’s unsentimental approach
a better guide in this regard? Asked differently, what do we do after we have
been heard and our pain acknowledged? Said is mostly silent on what
comes after protest (or critique, if you want), and it is here that he falls
short and reveals the limits of his ambiguously privileged status. Those of
us who want to see Muslims be more active participants in the making of a
better civilization, not chronic complainers about the ills (real and ima-
gined) that continue to befall them, have no option but to shelve Said’s
theory and move on to newer and bolder paradigms.
It is by now a well-rehearsed fact that ever since Muslim-majority
nations were awakened to the overwhelming superiority of Europe in the
late eighteenth century, they have been struggling to reconcile their inher-
ited belief in their God-given superiority and even chosenness with their
increasingly impotent status in relation to the West and, of late, other
326 anouar majid
nations around the world. The paths taken to deal with this traumatic
revelation – claiming that Islam has no issue with democracy or recovering
the undiluted faith of the ancestors – are both strategies of self-deception
that have led to endless turmoil, suffering and shocking cruelties. As the
gap between Muslims and others widened in the last two centuries,
Muslims, unable to break out of the iron cage of their religious narrative,
fought their domination and humiliation (whether real or merely per-
ceived) with more of the same, clinging tenaciously to their conviction that
their economic backwardness is the result of a diabolical strategy foisted on
them by coldhearted, voracious and immoral Westerners. Secular Marxists
in Muslim-majority nations also condemned Western capitalism and
colonialism, but they did so in the name of an international agenda of
liberation, not because, as Muslims do, they believed that they were God’s
chosen people, the loyal followers of a prophet who had been given the last
word from Allah.
Said’s theory of protest added to the Muslims’ sense of helplessness and,
what’s worse, allowed liberal and progressive scholars from both sides to
come to their rescue, armed by a sophisticated language that allowed for
little nuance and almost no genuine progressive critical thinking. The
Muslims, one could hear, are the victims of an imperialist and hegemonic
West. No thought was given to the oppressive regime produced by a vast
and varied canonical literature that allows no elbow room for any mean-
ingful form of autonomy, let alone a full culture of human rights. Shaped
by their own civil rights struggles and partisan battles, liberal Western
scholars became the self-appointed defenders of a tradition that, they
claimed, was being distorted before their very eyes. Muslims welcomed
such concern with open arms and exhibited almost no ability to make sense
of how they were being liberated by the very West they like to denounce.
The result was the perpetuation of failure and its nagging consequences on
the Muslim side as well as the transformation of entire academic fields into
hagiographic tributes to a forgotten Muslim past.
Western scholars of Islam, motivated by a desire to right wrongs and
defend what they think is a long-maligned tradition, have thus become
unwitting collaborators of a religion that has stifled freedoms, delayed
emancipation and inflicted incalculable damage on the Muslims who are
trapped in Muslim-majority societies. Speaking from well-endowed uni-
versities and places of freedom, they trade in a scholarship that only
entrenches academic fields with no practical relevance to the Muslims
who want to have the same privileges in their home countries. One
might say that writing the history of fifteenth-century Egypt has nothing
On Orientalism’s Future(s) 327
to do with the turbulent conflicts of our time, but this routine act of
historiography turns into an ideological move when such historians dis-
sociate their project from those who seek change in Muslim-majority
societies and culture through a hard-nosed critique of the Islamic tradition.
I have attended high-level conferences where scholars started their talks or
presentations with the Quranic bismallah (the opening verse of the Fatiha,
the first chapter in the Quran), thereby blurring belief and scholarship and
making it hard for critics to operate in such a mosque-like environment. In
the United States, members of the local Islamic community are sometimes
invited to symposia (where hummus is invariably served) and encouraged
to participate. Such experiences have led me to see such departments as
inadvertent promoters of a sort of academic Wahhabism since they pre-
clude the option of any vigorous criticism of the Islamic tradition. High-
quality journalism is not much better. When the New York Times made the
historic decision to dedicate an entire issue of its Sunday magazine to the
“fractured lands” of the Arab world on August 14, 2016, Islam, as a cause of
these fractures, was studiously avoided, leaving the impression that religion
simply has nothing to do with what ails Arabs. To what extent this culture
is indebted to the legacy of Said’s Orientalism is hard to tell, but it does
prove that Orientalists (if this is the term we are applying to those Western
scholars who specialize in Islam, the Middle East or the Arabs) are most
decidedly not cut from the same cloth. Many have contested Edward Said’s
flippant use of the term precisely on these grounds. I already mentioned
Robert Irwin. Daniel Varisco, in a different vein, has done an autopsy of
Said’s work and discovered egregious oversights and simplifications that
prove that Said had no interest in scholars who didn’t fit into his theory.5
In Muslim-majority nations, like Morocco, for instance, local scholars
who are schooled in cultural and postcolonial studies resort to the same
vocabulary deployed in American universities in the 1980s to dismiss any
attempt at criticizing Islamic traditions, making those of us who are
committed to a philosophy that condemns all oppressive systems, includ-
ing indigenous ones, agents of the imperialist West.
In this milieu, where Saidian Orientalism and Islam become natural
allies, to be critical is to court rejection, loss of funding and, basically,
public ostracism. This is intellectual terrorism at its best, but one would
never guess so by the looks of the hallways and faculty doors in depart-
ments of Middle East studies, English or cultural studies. In such corridors,
perfectly convenient for defenders of Islam and the Other, villainy starts
and ends with the West. (Incidentally, African studies tend to fall into the
same epistemological and ideological traps, building an entire academic
328 anouar majid
field on the premise that Africa is the land of black-skinned folk, not a
continent of many diverse cultures and traditions, including Islam and
Christianity, in which skin color is not a central fact of the African
experience. It is also telling that, while we have departments of African
studies, one would be hard pressed to enroll in a department of European
studies or assume that such a field is based on the whiteness of Europeans).6
This may sound a bit harsh to those of us who have been committed to
defending those who can’t defend or speak for themselves (the subaltern),
but, as noble as this mission is, we are also called upon to reexamine our
investment in such projects and tease out the threads of self-interest
(employment, publications, promotions) that prevent us, in the end,
from truly sympathizing with freedom seekers living in Muslim-majority
nations or even those in Muslim-minority enclaves in the West. I am not
saying that doing historical, anthropological or literary work is not a
worthy enterprise, and maybe I should not be expecting much from
scholars who are not interested in theory and its consequences; but my
point here is that if these scholars want members of Islamic societies to have
their same social and professional freedoms and privileges, then they
should at least make a deliberate effort not to museumify the Islamic
tradition and remove it from the currents of contemporary life.
My native Morocco, where I have spent almost half my time in recent
years, could be said to have been a significant regional power in the
eleventh century, but it has fallen precipitously since the rise of Europe
as a global power and is now scrambling to catch up to the benefits of
modernity. Salafi Islamists may denounce this approach as a race to
embrace the ungodly ways of the West, but no serious thinking person
wants to live in the caves and wastelands of seventh-century Arabia. One
way for progressive scholars who are inclined to brandish Orientalism as a
badge of struggle for social justice is to join hands with a number of
beleaguered colleagues who are contesting the traditional Islamic narrative
that has turned difference with orthodoxy into a major crime. Muslims
may have created good things in the Middle Ages, but they are now living
in some of the most despotic cultures in the world, denying rights to all
sorts of minorities and independent thinkers, while demanding that other
nations and cultures accommodate their beliefs and choices or else be
damned with the racial epithet of Islamophobia (even though Islam is
not a race but a religious manifesto) or even attacked violently if they think
Western literature or art are defaming their religion.
I was one of thirty Moroccans who contributed to a book titled Ce Qui
Nous Somme in response to the atrocities of Charlie Hebdo in 2015, titling
On Orientalism’s Future(s) 329
my chapter “Mohamed, Peut-il Être Français?” (Can Mohamed be
French?) at a time when there was a good deal of handwringing about
whether the Charlie cartoonists were insensitive to the Muslim lumpenpro-
letariat of the French banlieues.7 Inspired by a perfectly canonical edict to
kill anyone who dares insult the prophet of Islam, the assassins took down
some of the most progressive people in France, including an editor who
had spent a life defending illegal immigrants. Charlie Hebdo was not
available online for anyone to be offended by the cartoons, was not
distributed in the Muslim world and was published in a country where
such satire is legal. By the time more terror attacks hit French and
American nightclubs, there was nothing left to say except more of the
same denunciations. In the meantime, no major progressive voice in
academia rose to condemn this form of Islam. All we kept hearing is
what the French call the “langue de bois” (wooden language) of the
politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, exonerating Islam on the spot
from the mayhem its people are perpetrating and incompetently pointing
the finger at deranged extremists who, we are solemnly told, have no
relation to the religion they ostensibly defend.
Despite the powerful current to dismiss anyone who criticizes Islam as
an Islamophobe, it is beginning to dawn on intellectuals in and from
Muslim-majority nations that a traditional understanding of Islam is the
cause of many ills besetting Muslim societies and communities around the
globe. While a certain piety toward the discipline of Middle East or Islamic
studies envelops American universities, scholars in Morocco, Algeria,
Tunisia and elsewhere are beginning to poke at the false sacredness of
these beliefs, daringly depicting the prophet, as depicted by canonical
narratives, as a regular Arab enmeshed in the squabbles of his tribe and
community, not a superhuman being cleansed of all human flaws. Writing
from his native Algeria, the journalist and writer Kamel Daoud has reached
the English-speaking world with his fearless denunciations of the morbid
effects of Islamic traditions and his refusal to play into hands of Western
liberals.8
Small but brave groups of Arabs and Muslims are choosing to leave
Islam (whether for another religion or not) and are beginning to ask for
equal rights, or, at least, the right to their own conscience, without
suffering the fate of apostates. Western liberal institutions, such as
human rights organizations, government agencies or even academics,
often make the point of defending the rights of Arabs or Muslims perse-
cuted for their different views by putting pressure on their governments,
but they practically have no language to address the societal oppression that
330 anouar majid
emerges from tradition and which local governments manipulate for their
own ends.
In fact, the governing elites in Arab and Muslim countries can be far
more liberal than the people they govern, and it is they who introduce
measures (such as progressive family laws) against the deeply ingrained
wishes of their people. It may be convenient to blame autocratic govern-
ments (are they a latter-day expression of the “Oriental despotism” that still
defines political life in Arab and Muslim lands?), but how is one to aim the
same critical firepower at social regimes that are equally, if not more,
oppressive than the governments they give birth to? Critics of
Orientalism simply avoid this treacherous terrain, mostly, I suspect,
because it remains impensable but also because there is no cultural theory
that allows bon pensant progressives to find fault with people and their
traditions. The subaltern can only be the sacrificial lamb of history; it is
beyond the pale to see him or her as a villainous agent of an oppressive
regime. Much has been said about American white men without college
degrees in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016,
but nothing can be said about the Indian, Egyptian or Iraqi subaltern as a
perpetrator of repressive, even genocidal, actions. This Western anthro-
pological approach to the Other has led to the folklorization of Muslim
cultures, not to their emancipation.
It is in this sense (for which, of course, Edward Said is not fully
responsible) that one might say that Saidian Orientalism, while open-
ing new venues for analysis, has become counterproductive, if not
outright disabling for a form of scholarship that matters, one whose
goal is not just to interpret the world (albeit this act alone is vitally
important) but also to change it (as Marx rightly pointed out).9 I have
never understood the Westerner’s perpetual refuge in the mea culpa of
guilt, as if a harmless scholar in some rural campus in the United
States feels duty-bound to answer to all the sins of the Europeans who
conquered, massacred, colonized and dispossessed most of the world’s
peoples. Such a conviction has always struck me as utterly unconvin-
cing, reducing the complex and bloody pathways of history to an
inventory of national sins. How could a Minnesotan of Swedish
descent in St. Paul be accountable for the genocidal policies of
Spain in the New World, the German depredations in Africa or
British cruelties in India? A person is, legally and spiritually, accoun-
table only for his or her actions, and to tie one’s moral fate to what a
band of pale-looking desperadoes and savage opportunists have done
to darker-skinned people is, quite frankly, a way to avoid dealing with
On Orientalism’s Future(s) 331
the kinds of obligations I am about to argue are necessary for any self-
defining progressive intellectual to undertake.
Edward Said may be right when warning us to be careful when speaking
of broad categories. To me, this means avoiding at all costs the assumption
that theory allows us to make sense of complex and varied histories and
cultures, as if by merely conjuring a concept from the halls of academia we
can do away with the irreducible singularities of each period, nation, city or
village. I have long ceased calling myself an Arab or Muslim, or accepting
such categories as meaningful in any material historical way, and only use
them to the extent that they allow me to make sense of a well-defined
community, such as my native country Morocco and the United States, my
adopted homeland. I have the language, some degree of social capital and a
sense of these two countries’ histories, enough to make a difference (how-
ever minuscule) in both.
It is, indeed, to praxis that we must now turn, since, at heart, the scholars
who are concerned about the fate of the (Muslim) Other and who often
grow indignant at the slightest criticism of Muslims are assumed to be
motivated by a progressive worldview, a form of liberalism that refuses to
discriminate on the basis of skin color, national origin and, among many
other things, religious identity. It is the latter category that concerns me
here. The critics of Orientalism see themselves as engaged in a battle for
social justice and as upholders of diversity in a world which the so-called
‘white’ Europeans have dominated with an iron fist for far too long. This
position, in fact, gained momentum during the presidential campaign and
eventual election of Donald Trump in 2016. Critics of the real-estate-
mogul-turned-celebrity-turned-president condemned his shocking state-
ments about women, Mexicans, war veterans and Muslims, among others.
But once again, as in the case of scholarship, the collective liberal thinking
about Muslims was lacking in rigor, downplaying, mostly out of a lament-
able ignorance, the ideological dimensions of the Islamic faith. In that case,
we heard much about protecting American values, but what, exactly, are
these values? I once asked this question of a group of retired US intelligence
officers in the state of Maine. What are we defending when we go after the
reactionary types? It is this question, this unspoken corollary of critique,
this assumption that dares not speak its name that, in my opinion, future
scholarship needs to tackle, away from the glare of the demonic ghost of
Said or any other thinker who wields a crippling influence on the young
scholar’s thoughts.
I suggest that, in different expressions, what Said, most of the contribu-
tors to this volume, and many Western progressives are committed to is a
332 anouar majid
worldview that was shaped by the Enlightenment, a world where the
autonomy of the individual, the freedom of expression and the right to
live in dignity are assumed to be desirable, universal values, not malicious
Eurocentric ploys to ensnare the hapless Muslim Other. To be sure, most
of these values, as conceived and articulated, are of Euro-American prove-
nance, but an obsession with origins should not undercut the truisms of
history, that wherever ideas may first appear, they end up traveling and
diffused spatially and geographically until place of birth (if such thing
could ever be located with any reliable degree of accuracy) becomes mean-
ingless. By the way American preachers speak these days, one could be
forgiven for assuming that Christianity was born in the American South,
not in the tragic lands of the Middle East. There comes a time when a
foreign idea turns native. Such is the case of American Christianity, and
such is the case of most ideas that shape the modern world: they may have
been born in Europe, but countries like China and Japan are not about to
revert to a medieval order just to remain authentic. The insistence on
purity is, to me, far more problematic than the fear of Euro-American ideas
that have now become (for better or worse) the unavoidable norm anyway.
The eruption of Islamic extremism and the return of populism in the
decades preceding the publication of this book are faces of the same coin:
they reflect the failure of a liberal order that has reduced bold, revolu-
tionary Enlightenment concepts into a Disneyfied concern with a narrow
and distorted notion of diversity, elevating the doctrine of coded speech
above the robustness of free expression and championing false notions of
authenticity over the universal values that gave us both the American and
French revolutions as well as the new, dynamic world they engendered.
Those who prefer to protect Muslims-as-minorities while glossing over or
ignoring the oppressive elements of the Islamic faith appear, in the end, as
unprincipled progressives, supporting an ideology that is antithetical to the
Enlightenment and what it stands for. One needs to combine the humane
instinct of protecting the dignity of Others with an uncompromising
critique of belief systems that are divisive and, indeed, dehumanizing.
For in the monotheistic mindset, the Other is always a fallen being, a
misguided human who needs to be rescued from his or her backward ways
and baptized into the only truth. Muslims may be nice people, just like
rapacious capitalists or imperialists may be in person, but the kindness of
an individual shouldn’t obscure the ideology that stands behind him or
her. If Thomas Paine could be clear-eyed about the fantastical claims of
monotheism in the late eighteenth century,10 there is no reason why we
shouldn’t adopt the same attitude today and in the indefinite future.
On Orientalism’s Future(s) 333
Islamically inspired terrorism has stymied most progressives, but a few,
like Zineb El Rhazoui, the Moroccan-French Charlie Hebdo journalist, are
pointing the finger at confused liberal thinkers and accusing them of being
collaborationists and accomplices of Islamic fascism. To her, the fascistic
religion of Islam has accomplished what no other form of fascism has
managed to do, namely seducing the Western left to defend it and even, as
the case is in France, criminalize anyone who insults it. By conflating the
criticism of Islam-as-ideology with racism (a biological fact), Islamophobia
has handicapped all serious thought about Islam and basically made the
denunciation of Islam a culturally and legally unacceptable act. By con-
juring the “semantic ruse” of Islamophobia, Muslims and their unwitting
allies (“useful idiots,” El Rhazoui calls them) have, in effect, shielded a
religion that promotes sexism and violence against infidels, punishes free-
dom of conscience and expression, rejects democracy, banishes all differ-
ence as unholy and reveres a prophet whose documented record in later
Islamic writings (there is scant evidence of Mohammed-as-Prophet during
his assumed lifetime) is that of a conquering warlord with the sexual
prowess of thirty men. To be sure, it may be easy (but intellectually
problematic) to confine our ire to the fringe Muslim groups that have
flashed across television screens with numbing regularity in the last few
decades, but few progressives (unlike right-wing movements) have dared
point out that both the terrorists and their mainstream coreligionists draw
from the same canonical well. This is why El Rhazoui calls the so-called
average moderate Muslim a “jihad reservist.”
Part of the problem is that the left has been unable to find a language,
not to mention a theory, that addresses the complex issue of Islam without
falling into the trap of false consciousness or relying on a self-satisfying
humanitarianism that does little to improve the conditions of Muslims-as-
Others. In his Le mépris civilisé (Civilized contempt), the Swiss Israeli
psychologist and writer Carlo Strenger accuses the European left of failing
to stand up for the values of the Enlightenment, which was kick-started by
the likes of Spinoza in the seventeenth century. With the failure of
Communist and Maoist ideologies in the twentieth century, many of
these leftists chose self-flagellation over critique and found refuge in
identity politics or political correctness. Just like Islamophobia has stymied
all genuine critique of Islam, the charge of Eurocentrism is no less disabling
to liberal thinkers. The latter find it difficult to state that Western civiliza-
tion, despite its innumerable flaws, is the most advanced in world history,
that the world’s free states today are mostly Western states, or that
Abrahamic religious accounts, like the order to sacrifice Isaac (or Ishmael
334 anouar majid
in Islam) for the sake of God are just too offensive to be taken seriously. A
progressive cannot be racist, of course, but he or she can at least express a
“civilized contempt” for archaic practices that do nothing to emancipate
the locals whose colorful cultures enchant us out of our minds.11
In a similar vein, the French intellectual Jean Birnbaum expresses
puzzlement as to why the Left can’t understand that Islam and Islamism
are fundamentally and implacably hostile to any secular, liberating vision.
In his Un silence religieux, Birnbaum traces the French Left’s deliberate
avoidance of Islam all the way back to Algerian revolution against French
colonialism, for, although there were many clues that the Algerian
Liberation Front, acting like an anticolonial liberation movement, was,
in fact, engaged in a jihad against the infidel occupier, there was almost a
willed blindness to this reality.12 Many years later, when Michel Foucault
was sent to Iran by the Italian newspaper Correre della sera to cover the
upheaval against the Shah in that country, none of the people he inter-
viewed mentioned anything about a revolution. To his question “What do
you want?” the Iranians in the street simply replied “Islamic govern-
ment.”13 It is, therefore, not for no reason that Karl Marx, as his friend
Moses Hess noted in an 1841 letter, took religion extremely seriously. For
Marx, “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.” Religion
may offer solace and even happiness to the oppressed, but such comfort,
Marx adds in his “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” is a counter-
productive illusion that doesn’t truly relieve suffering or lead to true
emancipation.14
We are back to Karl Marx’s views on India, which Said finds “puzzling,”
since they are not mindless expressions of any run-of-the-mill nineteenth-
century English writer but the considered thought of a man committed to
fighting injustice and rescuing long-enslaved humans from the clutches of
exploitation in whatever shape it appears. Perhaps Marx’s central view on
the subject, and from which Said quotes at some length, is his “The British
Rule in India,” published as an opinion piece in the New-York Daily
Tribune on June 25, 1853.15 Reading it more than a hundred and fifty
years later, and replacing India with Islam, may help us understand why
the argument is still valid today, and why, in my opinion, there is no real
alternative to Marx’s position, if the goal is, first and foremost, the
emancipation of Muslims.
Marx is aware of India’s rich history, but, given his teleological view of
world history, he understandably doesn’t share the belief in an Indian
“golden age,” since the vast majority of Indians have lived in a state of
misery since long before the Christian era. Despotic central governments
On Orientalism’s Future(s) 335
ruled over a “village system” that was already being dissolved by the
introduction of modern technology and free trade. For those who believe
in cultural diversity, the dissolution of a millennial system may feel like a
tragic loss, but Marx harbored no illusion about the deeply oppressive
practices associated with Indian village life. He asks us “not to forget that
these idyllic villages-communities, inoffensive though they may appear,
had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they
restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making
it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving beneath traditional rules,
depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.”
One could use the same language today to describe the condition of
reliably exotic Muslim-majority nations, where unexamined medieval
doctrines are violently opposed to modern concepts of autonomy, freedom
and human rights. Marx knows that the West, like England in India, may
be driven by the “vilest interests” and “stupid” ways of executing them, but
that, he adds, “is not the question.” To replace, once again, India with
Islam, one would have to ask whether humanity can “fulfil its destiny
without a fundamental revolution in the social state,” of Muslim-majority
nations or even major Muslim-minority communities elsewhere.
Obviously, when I speak about Islam needing to be subjected to the
same protocols of critique applied to other facets of intellectual and
cultural life, my main motivation is the development of Homo islamicus,
the person who is subjected to conflicting and ultimately disabling social
and moral demands, a person torn between loyalty to blind faith and the
irresistible lure of modern life. This is, quite simply, a personal matter to
me. I want my fellow Moroccans to experience the fulfilling freedoms
available to, say, the Spaniards, Italians, South Koreans and Argentines and
not be beholden forever to medieval dictates whose ultimate goal is a form
of austere absolutism that reduces life to joyless rituals whose goal is to
avoid punishment in the hereafter.
In short, if Western-style critics truly care about the condition of people
in Muslim-majority nations, a first step would be not to patronize them
through counterproductive acts of understanding but by subjecting their
beliefs to the same scrutiny Christianity, Judaism and other religions have
endured for a while now. If a reluctance to do so is motivated by fear of
retaliation, then the case only proves my point. Oriental despotism has to
dissolve under the merciless march of capitalism before the world emerges
together from the ruins of blind profit to build a more humane civilization,
one in which squabbling over what’s authentically Western or Islamic will
be seen as an archaic relic of a dangerous illusion.
336 anouar majid
Notes
1. See Mathew Ingram, “This Chinese Billionaire Has His Sights Set on Buying
Hollywood,” Fortune, November 4, 2016.
2. Edward Said’s discussion of Karl Marx on British imperialism is in his
Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 153–156. I will return to this
polemic at the end of my chapter.
3. Anouar Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-
Andalusian Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
4. Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents
(Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2006).
5. See Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2007).
6. See my chapter, “The North as Apocalypse,” in Unveiling Traditions:
Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000), pp. 73–98.
7. “Mohamed, Peut-il Être Français?,” in Ce Qui Nous Somme: Réflexions
Marocaines Après les Événements des 7 au 11 Janvier 2015 À Paris, ed.
Abdelkader Retnani (Casablanca, Morocco: La Croisée des Chemins, 2015),
pp. 241–249.
8. Hespress, the best-read electronic Arabic daily in Morocco, and one of the
most-read in the Arab world, publishes regular essays that infuriate its readers.
For an excellent recent treatment of Mohammed that is yet to be translated
into English, see Hela Ouardi, Les derniers jours de Muhammad (Paris: Albin
Michel, 2016). For an overview of the Kamel Daoud work and thought, see
the French weekly Le Point, February 9, 2017.
9. Karl Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach,” in Marx/Engels Selected Works (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1969), 1: pp. 13–15, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wor
ks/1845/theses/theses.htm (accessed March 13, 2019).
10. See, for example, Thomas Paine, “The Age of Reason, Being an Investigation
of True and Fabulous Theology,” in Paine: Collected Writings (New York:
Library of America, 2006), pp. 665–830.
11. See Carlo Strenger, Le mépris civilisé, translated from the German (Montreal:
Éditions Belfond, 2016).
12. Jean Birnbaum, Un silence religieux: La gauche face au djihadisme (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 2016).
13. Quoted in Birnbaum, Un silence religieux, p. 103.
14. Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Marx on Religion,
ed. John Raines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 171.
15. Kark Marx, “The British Rule in India,” Daily Tribune (New York), June 25,
1853, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm (accessed March
13, 2019). See also “Articles by Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune, 1852–
61,” www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/newspapers/new-york-tri
bune.htm (accessed March 13, 2019).
chapter 19

“The Engine of Survival”: A Future

For Orientalism
Patrick Williams

I’ve seen the nations rise and fall,

I’ve heard their stories, heard them all,
but love’s the only engine of survival
Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

Introduction: The Insufﬁciency of Edward Said

A constant in the forty-year life of Orientalism is that it has been judged
variously unsatisfactory, flawed, insufficient, unnecessary and unaccept-
able from a wide range of political, religious, ethnic and academic posi-
tions. What, one wonders, is so wrong with it, that people are queuing up
to condemn it, and, if it is so wrong, how has it managed not only to
survive but to flourish – translated into more than thirty-five languages by
the early years of this century? Looking at the phenomenon from a slightly
different angle, one could ask: “What is it about Orientalism that so
frightens or disturbs so many different groups and individuals?”
Even from within departments of literary theory, which might have
been assumed to contain the strongest natural allies for the book’s project,
the 1980s witnessed a scramble to critique Orientalism, to correct it or to
“go beyond” it. (Even today, that curious desire for transcendence and
hope to “go beyond” still drives books with titles like Re-Orienting
Orientalism that continue to appear.) Above all, perhaps, Said’s productive
use of Foucault and Gramsci was deemed theoretically unworkable, neither
“high” nor “pure” enough in its typically Saidian freewheeling linkage of
poststructuralism and Marxism to satisfy partisans of either school.
Simultaneously, a different kind of rejection came from departments of
literature, where Orientalism’s argument threatened a very different form
of transcendence – the traditional claim for the ability of the work of
literature to rise above the messy and the mundane, especially anything
337
338 patrick williams
that smelt of real-life politics. (There is, no doubt, a study to be made of
why, or when, Orientalism has been deemed to fail, the various conjunc-
tural, strategic, disciplinary or other needs – including, no doubt, the
unfortunately self-promotional – served by its repeated rejection.)

Reﬁghting the Good Fight

There is a strange repetitiveness in the cycle of attack on, and defense of,
Said: a critic pops up, voices objections; a supporter emerges, attempts a
defense or rebuttal; little seems to have been learned, as the same or similar
dissatisfactions reappear, perhaps from a slightly different direction, some
time later. While Marxists – above all, Marx himself and Gramsci – were
very aware that victories were no guarantee of a stable future state and that
the same battles were likely to be refought, it can be hard, in a context such
as the discussion of a work like Orientalism, not to think, “We’ve been here
(so many times) before. Can’t we at least ﬁnd a new source of disagree-
ment?” Accordingly, if readers feel they are experiencing a Groundhog Day
moment, I can only apologize for an unavoidable repetition and take some
comfort from the fact that Said’s great friend, the activist-intellectual Eqbal
Ahmad, was ﬁrmly of the opinion that repetition in these areas is essential:
“truth has to be repeated. It doesn’t become stale just because it has been
told once. So keep repeating it. Don’t bother about who has listened, who
has not listened.”1 (It is worth pointing out, however, that, repetitions
notwithstanding, no claim to “truth” as such is being made here.)

“Criticism before Solidarity”

The phrase, and the principle, was one of Said’s watchwords. It is one that
is particularly difficult to hold on to when you yourself are being criticized
by someone who you would normally expect to show solidarity. One of the
more egregious examples in Said’s case was the ad hominem attack
launched on him by Aijaz Ahmad in his book In Theory: Classes, Nations,
Literatures. It is a principle I wish – somewhat hesitantly – to invoke here.
Although my chapter questions a number of the claims made by Anouar
Majid in his Chapter 18 of this volume, I believe we are on the same side:
the starting point for both of us is secular; we both have grave doubts about
the workings of institutionalized religion; we would like to see a critical,
oppositional, intelligentsia; we would both love to see the Marxist vision of
emancipated humanity made real. All of that notwithstanding, Majid’s
contribution to this volume certainly invites, or incites, a response.
“The Engine of Survival”: A Future For Orientalism 339
Getting It Wrong
The aim of Anouar Majid’s Chapter 18 is to interrogate Orientalism, with a
view to establishing its current and future utility. The aim of this chapter is
to debate with Majid, also in order to establish the future utility of
Orientalism. Although his contribution is entitled “On Orientalism’s
Future(s),” Majid is one of those who find Said and Orientalism insuffi-
cient, and this chapter will examine some of the issues he raises, particularly
the variety of ways in which Said is seen to be getting it wrong. The
opening paragraph, it has to be said, is not auspicious – Said falls at the
first hurdle, indeed at the first sentence:
As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Edward Said’s
Orientalism, it seems, to me, at least, that the postcolonial urgency its thesis
had engendered has long been overshadowed by global transformations that
have scrambled the geography of oppression.
The point is relevant: the world of the final quarter of the twentieth century
is in many ways not that of the second decade of the twenty-first, and one
of the important changes taking place may indeed be in “the geography of
oppression.” Majid goes on to elaborate:
The Chinese have already acquired significant chunks of Hollywood, one of
the major producers of Orientalist images; the skylines of certain oil-rich
Arab cities are dwarfing the aging ones in Manhattan and Chicago; the best
soccer teams in the world are sponsored by Arab sheikhs; and every human
being on earth covets an American or West-European lifestyle.
The first three points are certainly correct; the fourth is at the very least
debatable. What is not at all clear, however, is how this relates to oppres-
sion. However much we may deplore the very best of our football clubs
being swallowed one after another by oil sheikhs (or dodgy Russian
oligarchs), the impact on oppression – local or global – is not obvious.
Similarly, although some may feel diminished in personal or national terms
by having a smaller skyline than the Arabs, a shift in oppression does not
seem to be the most obvious cause or effect here. There is perhaps more
relevance in the Chinese acquisition of parts of Hollywood, which might
indeed result in some Orientals (above all the Chinese) being better
represented but, equally, might have little effect on the images of Arabs
Hollywood typically trades in. (Do the Chinese care about how Arabs and
Islam are represented when blockbuster revenues are at stake? We have yet
to find out.) Finally, “every human being on earth covets an American or
West-European lifestyle.” If that is the case, does that make them, as
340 patrick williams
aspirants to our array of Western benefits, less oppressed, or, conversely,
are they more oppressed, living lives whose dreams may never remotely
approach fulfillment?
A second failure on the part of Said is found in the same paragraph: his
objections to what he sees as Marx’s Orientalist representation of colonized
India. Said’s notorious lèse-majesté has been one of the most frequently
criticized aspects of Orientalism, and Majid joins in that criticism: “Said’s
objection to Marx, in fact, highlights the ideological flaws of his theory and
explains, to a large and heartbreaking degree, the current impasse the world
of the presumed ‘Orientals,’ or postcolonial subjects … find themselves in
today.” Unfortunately, the key elements in this are not clear. Firstly, what
exactly are “the ideological flaws of his theory,” and how are they instan-
tiated in his objecting to the perceived Orientalist position adopted, on this
occasion, by someone whose political and analytical approach was, typi-
cally, entirely other? It may be that Said is not Marxist enough for Majid’s
liking, but even if that is taken to be the case, is it sufficient to render his
entire theory ideologically flawed? The lack of clarity is even more of a
problem in relation to the second half of the sentence, where Said’s failure
“explains … the current impasse [in] the world of the presumed
‘Orientals,’” where we neither know what the impasse consists of nor
how Said’s failure explains it.
Shortly after this, Majid goes on to say: “Edward Said went to great and
not infrequently exaggerated lengths to show us how the Orient is a
Western fabrication, a discursive trope that has disempowered Orientals
and left them without agency on the stage of history.” He then adds, “It’s
hard to disagree with this thesis …” This admission is interesting, if slightly
confusing, given that strongly voiced criticism of the way in which
Orientalism has created an unhelpful position of permanent passive vic-
timage for Orientals forms the centre of his chapter’s argument. Returning
to the quotation, we are again in a position of uncertainty: what are the
“great and not infrequently exaggerated lengths” to which Said went?
What exactly was he exaggerating? More importantly, Said is in fact not
arguing that Orientals have been disempowered and “left … without
agency on the stage of history.” Orientalism is – scandalously for some –
concerned above all with the power of the Western nations and not with
the powerlessness of the Orientals they colonized, ruled and exploited. The
production of forms of knowledge about the Orient, and the many ways in
which these representations are actively supportive of, passively complicit
with, or co-opted and manipulated by, the institutions and power systems
of the West (regardless, in the latter case, of any active intention or aim on
“The Engine of Survival”: A Future For Orientalism 341
the part of the authors), is what Said is interested in – the oppressed
Orientals (and other Others) will have to await their turn and other books.
At certain moments, it can seem as if Said is not getting too much
wrong:
Let us then say that Said’s protest is well justified, that Western scholars have
no moral right to misrepresent Orientals in order to allow mal pensants
imperial governments to act on them with impunity. And even if allowing
that such a nefarious scholarly activity had always been the norm, that
Western scholarship was always deployed for conquests and domination,
we are not any more enlightened by such discovery.
The problem here is that this is not what Said is saying. Firstly, he says
nothing at all about the moral rights of scholars; although he carefully
dissects their Orientalism, he avoids questions of morality. Secondly, and
even more importantly, he categorically does not suggest that “such a
nefarious scholarly activity had always been the norm, that Western
scholarship was always deployed for conquests and domination.” As briefly
mentioned in the previous paragraph, the relationship of writers to
Orientalism, and to colonialism, was very varied and certainly not what
Majid is claiming. Even the most erudite and scholarly works, unrepen-
tantly Islamophile or Sinophile, full of praise for the richness of Oriental
culture, could find themselves co-opted in the project of dominating that
culture. Most striking of Majid’s comments here, however, is the assertion
that “we are not any more enlightened by such discovery.” This is really
rather strange, given that it was precisely Said’s demonstration of the
complex network of connections between Western texts and Western
domination of other cultures that enlightened many and outraged some.
Perhaps Majid is suggesting that “we” are no longer enlightened by such
information because we know it all anyway now. It would be wonderful if
that were the case.
Another problem with what Said may or may not be saying has wider
implications. Majid says:
Edward Said may be right when warning us to be careful when speaking of
broad categories. To me, this means avoiding at all costs the assumption that
theory allows us to make sense of complex and varied histories and cultures,
as if by merely conjuring a concept from the halls of academia we can do
away with the irreducible singularities of each period, nation, city, or village.
“Broad categories” is, however, not something that Said has any problem
with – empty, essentializing generalizations, yes, but anyone who can, as
Said does, talk about “universalizing the struggle” has no difficulty with
342 patrick williams
breadth. More broadly, it is not clear how one can dismiss theory’s ability
to help us “make sense of complex and varied histories” and still claim to be
a Marxist. Surely, Marxism is premised on its ability to understand and
analyze wide-ranging historical, cultural or economic phenomena through
its particular deployment of theory. In addition, the idea that, thirty years
after Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a nation can be under-
stood as an irreducible singularity seems very strange indeed.
The most serious of Majid’s accusations relate to Said’s impact on
Islam. Majid suggests: “What Edward Said may have done is give a
language to people who feel oppressed by the superiority of Euro
Americans.” These people are above all Muslims, and they apparently
use their newly acquired language to complain endlessly about “their
increasingly impotent status in relation to the West” and the many
ways in which they are victimized. This is taken to be the fault of
Said. For Said, however, the many (unfortunate or deliberate) mis-
interpretations and misunderstandings of his own position and that of
Orientalism with regard to Islam were at the forefront of the see-
mingly endless process of errors to be repeatedly addressed. In the
Preface to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Orientalism, brought
out shortly before his death in 2003, Said wrote about how he had
addressed misreadings of his work a decade earlier in the 1994
“Afterword” and how they still kept coming round. Orientalism, for
example, was read as a wholesale denunciation of the West in support
of Islam, while Said was taken to be a champion of the Muslims in
their downtrodden state. These and other such claims are, of course, a
long way from the truth. At the risk of stating the very obvious,
Orientalism was not written in support of Islam, nor to portray
Muslims as victims, nor to encourage victim mentalities on the part
of anyone; Said is not pro-Islam as such; he is anti-misrepresentation
and anti-oppression, whatever the culture, community or religion
being subjected to them; he is not putting forward a simplistic
model of the (wicked) West endlessly oppressing the (downtrodden)
East. If people choose to misread and misuse Said, that is hardly his
fault: to blame him for others’ choice of perpetual victimage would be
akin to blaming Marx for Stalin’s purges, executions, gulags and
famines (though no doubt some might feel inclined to do just that).
In fact, Majid goes on to suggest that Muslims’ “clinging tenaciously
to their conviction that their economic backwardness is the result of a
diabolical strategy foisted on them by coldhearted, voracious and
immoral Westerners” is part of a process stretching back at least
“The Engine of Survival”: A Future For Orientalism 343
two hundred years, and as such their sense of victimization is not
logically attributable to Said’s influence.

Bad Islam, Bad Intellectuals

It is not just Muslims who have been misled by Said, however. Intellectuals
and academics, both in the West and in postcolonial countries such as
Majid’s native Morocco, all of whom ought to know better by virtue of
their practice and profession, have apparently allowed themselves to be
ensnared to such an extent that
his theory has become so entrenched that it has turned into the default sign
of bien pensant academics and intellectuals. Said’s Orientalism acts as a false
redemption mechanism for those of us who benefit from the West’s largesse
and still feel obligated to stand up for the subalterns left behind.
In addition,
Said’s theory of protest added to the Muslims’ sense of helplessness and,
what’s worse, allowed liberal and progressive scholars from both sides to
come to their rescue, armed by a sophisticated language that allowed for
little nuance and almost no genuine progressive critical thinking.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that a “theory of protest” was not what Said
thought he was producing: he did not regard Orientalism as a theory as such,
and “protest” was not the aim. On the other hand, the problems posed by
theory’s increasing rareification, political disconnection, lack of “worldli-
ness” (in Saidian terms) and (over-)sophisticated language already concerned
him. While deconstruction and poststructuralism in particular exemplified
these problems for Said, the suggestion that “almost no genuine progressive
critical thinking” emerged from the area of postcolonial studies inspired by
Orientalism is very strange indeed and, given the lack of detail or supporting
evidence in Majid’s claim, difficult to debate satisfactorily.
One source of Majid’s unhappiness with intellectuals is their failure to
criticize Islam appropriately: “No thought was given to the oppressive
regime produced by a vast and varied canonical literature that allows no
elbow room for any meaningful form of autonomy, let alone a full culture
of human rights.” In addition, “few progressives … have dared point out
that both the [Islamist] terrorists and their mainstream coreligionists draw
from the same canonical well.”
Majid’s general categorization of Islam as monolithic, unchanging,
oppressive and productive of a culture inferior to that of the West oddly
344 patrick williams
echoes the original definition of Islamophobia formulated by the
Runnymede Trust in 1997,2 as well as, of course, the dismissals offered
by everyone from innumerable Orientalists to contemporary racist politi-
cians such as Geert Wilders. Given that context, as well as Said’s repeated
arguments against essentialism and his efforts to put forward a view of
Islam as varied, changing (sadly not necessarily for the better) and pos-
sessed of genuine positive potential, such as in its tradition of ijtihad, or
critical debate, it would be unusual to expect anyone drawing on
Orientalism to come out with a simple blanket dismissal.
This is not to suggest that Islam, any more than any other religion, is
above criticism. Quite the reverse: repressive practices need to be chal-
lenged, whoever is responsible, and Islam certainly has had, and continues
to have, its share of them. Further, it is not my intention to debate Majid’s
analysis of Islam, nor Islamist violence; however, given his view of the
unremittingly negative impact of Islam on its followers, the “incalculable
damage” it has inflicted, it is perhaps interesting (though not statistically
hugely significant) to observe that in the years I spent as lecturer at the
University of Marrakesh in Majid’s native Morocco, the tangibly restrain-
ing, sometimes brutally repressive, even murderous, force in society was
not – for anyone I came across – Islam but the supposedly Westernizing,
modernizing, socially improving regime of King Hassan II. The regime’s
vicious crackdown on anything resembling dissident intellectuals – in one
case, students at the University of Marrakesh who, in the early 1980s, were
subject to mass arrests, show trials, outrageous prison sentences and, in
some cases, death in custody – indicated that a desire to copy the “superior”
West was no guarantee of any lessening of repression.
Having addressed just a few of the issues Majid raises, it is time to
turn to the central question of this chapter: the future, or not, of
Orientalism.

A future for Orientalism?

Obstacles
It would be easy to come away from Orientalism with a pessimistic view of
the relationship of texts and certain dominating, even globalizing, forms of
power. Western manipulation of Orientalist knowledge has continued
undiminished for several centuries and is not looking like it is ending
any time soon, as Said somewhat gloomily admits in the final chapter: “It is
equally apparent, I think, that the circumstances making Orientalism a
“The Engine of Survival”: A Future For Orientalism 345
continuingly persuasive type of thought will persist: a rather depressing
matter on the whole.”3
In those “circumstances,” it may not be clear what the future for
Orientalism might look like. Although Majid says that he wants to think
about “the futures of Orientalism,” by the end of the paragraph where that
comment appears, it is clear that as far as he is concerned Orientalism in fact
has no future, as he concludes:
Those of us who want to see Muslims be more active participants in the
making of a better civilization, not chronic complainers about the ills (real
and imagined) that continue to befall them, have no option but to shelve
Said’s theory and move on to newer and bolder paradigms.
Unfortunately, Majid does not tell us what any of these “newer and bolder
paradigms” are, but the need, once again, to “go beyond” Said – this time
in a manner more thoroughgoingly dismissive than usual – is clear.
One of Said’s failings that make the rejection of Orientalism necessary
for Majid is in relation to the question of praxis. Majid says, “Said is mostly
silent on what comes after protest (or critique, if you want), and it is here
that he falls short and reveals the limits of his ambiguously privileged
status.” For Majid, what is missing in Said is any mention of forms of
praxis. Before we discuss that, however, it is necessary to address the issue
of Said’s “ambiguously privileged status,” since the manner in which it is
framed raises both critical and political issues. This is not the only occasion
Majid makes reference to it, and it is clearly a problem for him, though it is
not obvious where the privilege lies: although Said went to a good school in
Cairo, his background was not conspicuously wealthy; he was a university
professor in the United States, but so is Majid (indeed, one could argue
that, as a head of department, Majid is even more privileged). Given that,
for Marxists, the question of whether a member of the bourgeoisie could
appropriately fight alongside the working class was settled over a century
ago, not least because Marx says as much in the Communist Manifesto,
Said’s ability to represent and intervene on behalf of “the downtrodden he
presumably [sic] defends” need not detain us unduly.
Praxis is more of a problem for Majid: Said is not actually doing enough
or telling us how to do more; he offers us critique but nothing beyond that.
We need the “newer and bolder paradigms” to tell us what to do in the
future. Unfortunately, the position is not as simple as “critique is insuffi-
cient.” Although the Marxist tradition (generally) accords primacy to
practice, both theory/critique and practice are essential and indissolubly
linked. In addition, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx
346 patrick williams
sees praxis as, among other things, a form of critique, in this case a critique
of self-alienation (which might have relevance for the abject intellectuals
Majid describes); he also suggests that theory should be regarded as one of
the forms of praxis. Since Majid himself has previously written on
“Critique as Dehegemonizing Practice,”4 it is hard, in the absence of
further information, to see why critique, as the critical-theoretical practice
of engaged intellectuals, is inadequate, nor what else we should be doing. If
all it involves is the criticizing of Islam that Majid calls for, then the
praxis – if that is what it amounts to – is already in place. Majid paints a
picture of an enfeebled, would-be progressive intelligentsia, afraid to voice
the truth in the face of “the glare of the demonic ghost of Said or any other
thinker who wields a crippling influence on the young scholar’s thoughts.”
That may, perhaps, be the sad state of affairs in the United States; it is not, I
would suggest, the case elsewhere. Even in the USA, a book such as Kecia
Ali’s Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur‘an, Hadith, and
Jurisprudence5 ought to offer an example of willingness to reevaluate and
criticize.
One point on which Majid and Said, despite fundamental disagree-
ments, might overlap to some extent relates to the failure of intellectuals
as an obstacle to progress. For Said, Orientalism represented individual
and collective failure on the part of intellectuals writing about the Orient,
and its contemporary persistence signals a continuation of that
failure. For Majid, on the other hand, the failure of contemporary
intellectuals – guilt-ridden, self-censoring and overly politically correct
when it comes to Islam – is the fault of Said and Orientalism. Where both
would agree, however, is that intellectuals need to improve. While Said
may not give us a set of explicit instructions or “bolder paradigms” in
Orientalism, it does not take much to work out what he thinks is required:
understand better; represent better; interact and intervene better.

What Future?
On one level, the question of whether Orientalism has a future or not is a
non-question: it has a guaranteed future in the context of Said’s oeuvre, its
foundational analysis of modes of domination complemented by – among
so many others – Culture and Imperialism’s focus on indigenous resistance
and Covering Islam’s analysis of media coverage of Islamic religion and
culture, carrying forward the range of Saidian concerns and contestations.
If, however, we take the more artificial step of thinking about whether
Orientalism in isolation has a viable future, then very different answers are
“The Engine of Survival”: A Future For Orientalism 347
suggested. One would be that Orientalism has a future because its argu-
ments and evidence have never been refuted at an intellectual level and
continue to be ever more relevant at an existential one. In relation to the
former, Majid seems impressed by the posthumous attacks on Said
mounted by various Orientalists:
Many [Orientalists] have contested Edward Said’s flippant use of the term
precisely on these grounds. I already mentioned Robert Irwin. Daniel
Varisco, in a different vein, has done an autopsy of Said’s work and
discovered egregious oversights and simplifications that prove that Said
had no interest in scholars who didn’t fit into his theory.
While Varisco is certainly the best of the bunch, the high-profile
Orientalists, particularly Bernard Lewis, Robert Irwin and Ibn Warraq,
have failed to match Said analytically or polemically. Better academics,
such as the sociologist Bryan Turner, have similarly repeatedly tried and
failed to argue convincingly for the obsolescence of Orientalism. (I have
written briefly about this elsewhere.)6 At the evidential level of lived
human experience, which mattered so much to Said in the face of what
he saw as theory’s tendency to depersonalize, the relevance of a Saidian
analysis to the rise in anti-Muslim attacks following the UK’s referendum
decision to leave the European Union, the Dutch prime ministerial candi-
date Geert Wilders’ categorization of Moroccans as “scum,” coupled with
his desire to kick them all out of his country, or Donald Trump’s pre-
election promise to summarily halt all Muslim immigration into the
United States, and his post-election attempts partially to implement that,
requires no comment.
A very different kind of answer would relate to Orientalism’s own
prefiguring of a future, in this case one not shaped by gross cultural
generalizations, demeaning religious stereotypes or dehumanizing racial
representations, all of these fueled by, among others, rabid nationalism,
mindless xenophobia and a desire to dominate. Here, “[p]erhaps the most
important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary
alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and
peoples from a libertarian, or non-repressive and non-manipulative, per-
spective.”7 The aim is a better kind of knowledge, but not knowledge for its
own sake, since the ultimate aim is freedom. This is literally Said’s last
word on Orientalism: the final sentence of his Preface to the 2003 edition,
written shortly before his death, is “I would like to believe that Orientalism
has had a place in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom”
(p. xxiii).
348 patrick williams
For some, the adumbration of such a liberated future would be nothing
more than utopian, and, in an interview from the mid-1980s, Said speci-
fically distanced himself from any suspicion of involvement in utopianism:
The point is that I am not talking about inventing utopias or utopianism.
Chomsky talks about this in reference to C. S. Pierce’s notion of abduction, a
formulation of hypotheses based upon the known facts. You posit some-
thing, take in as much as you can of the present, and out of that, and in
fidelity to that – imperfect though our apprehension of the known facts may
be – you abduct from it a possible future hypothesis.8

For the great theoretician of utopia Ernst Bloch, however, what Said has
outlined here would in fact count as commendable utopian thinking.
Certainly, Orientalism’s astringent critique of discursive power and colo-
nial domination carries none of the warm and fuzzy feel many associate
with utopias. That, Bloch would argue, is because the typical image of
utopia – and Said may perhaps be guilty of this too – is an erroneous one.
Bloch recognizes that utopia has been more criticized than celebrated as
a concept, and one reason for that is the unproductive forms in which it has
been both imagined and understood. Recognizing that the concept itself
requires more rigorous and sustained interrogation, Bloch, in The Principle
of Hope, differentiates between what he calls abstract and concrete utopia.
The former, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the problem: “Pure wishful think-
ing has discredited utopias for centuries, both in pragmatic political terms
and in all other expressions of what is desirable; just as if every utopia were
an abstract one. And undoubtedly the utopian function is only immaturely
present in abstract utopianizing.”9 Abstract utopia presents a range of
negative characteristics: it is compensatory, aiming to offer solace for the
dissatisfactions of life; it is contemplative, encouraging a passive orienta-
tion; it is orientated toward the past and to that extent relatively divorced
from the present or the future; it is, as Bloch says, “immature,” not least
because its ideas do not escape the realm of fantasy. These, then, are the
abstract utopian aspirations, ones that have dominated both the particular
models of utopia and the way that people in general have thought about it.
The task then is to rescue utopian thought from the ideological and the
fantastic, to reveal what is rational, possible and progressive, in the shape of
“concrete utopia.” Bloch is aiming not only to rehabilitate the concept of
Utopia generally but also, and perhaps more importantly for him, to
demonstrate its value for the Marxist tradition, so much so that he
comes to argue that concrete utopia is in fact Marxism. One of the key
qualities of concrete utopia is that it is anticipatory: Bloch talks about
“The Engine of Survival”: A Future For Orientalism 349
“anticipatory consciousness,” and his notion of Vorschein or “anticipatory
illumination” is central to the way in which utopian thought is oriented
toward, and perceives, the future. “Expectation, hope, intention towards
possibility that has still not become: this is not only a basic feature of
human consciousness, but, concretely corrected and grasped, a basic
determination within objective reality as a whole” (p. 7). Recognizing
what is practically possible, and working toward its emergence or its
creation, are linked elements in the production of concrete utopia. To
that extent, the concrete, unlike the contemplative abstract version, is an
active category, grounded in productive and progressive human agency.
The latter is essential, because the desired, anticipated future will not
simply happen of its own accord or miraculously be discovered to already
exist – such ideas are, for Bloch, part of the reason why utopia can be so
easily dismissed. In addition, the desired future is not simply “there,” in
terms of a fully worked-out, comprehensively detailed blueprint, which
only requires people to follow the plan to make it happen; on the contrary,
it is partly glimpsed, partly understood and very much carefully con-
structed through the ongoing practice of those who desire it. The fact
that the future is not given or guaranteed necessitates both vigilance and
intervention. Further, not all wished-for futures are good: both Nazism
and Zionism embody projects that Bloch is prepared to accept as utopian,
though he rejects both as in any way desirable. In the context of all of this,
the overcoming of Orientalism through a future-oriented concrete utopian
project seems altogether appropriate.

The Engine of Survival

For Leonard Cohen, in the context of the rise and fall of nations and
empires that is also that of Orientalism, the “engine of survival” is love, and,
while that may seem a long way from anything Said is discussing, I would
like to suggest that he and Leonard Cohen are closer than they might
appear. Readers familiar with the song will of course know that its narrator
persona repeatedly reminds us that “I have seen the future – it is murder.”
Despite that gloomy prognosis, I would argue that a determinedly opti-
mistic Blochian project remains the way forward.
One of the positive things that Orientalism unquestionably produces is
understanding – without which we cannot hope to progress or even to love
appropriately. The understanding here is not only how we got to the
position we are in – how Orientalism and Orientalist attitudes and
processes have helped to construct the world we inhabit – but also the
350 patrick williams
terrain on which we need to continue to struggle. With understanding
comes both the ability to critique and intervene more effectively and also
the possibility of at least respecting (if not automatically loving) the Other.
In that context, Majid’s call for a stance of “civilized contempt” toward
Islam appears utterly misguided, if not disturbingly reminiscent of classic
Orientalism: We are civilized; you are not. We feel justified contempt for
your unacceptable ideas, appalling behavior and archaic culture …
It was mentioned earlier that Said considers the failure of Orientalism to
be an intellectual one, but in addition, and more importantly, the failure is
human: “Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also
to see it as human experience,”10 and the necessary response to that is both
human and humanist. In the heady atmosphere of theoretical debates in
the 1980s and later, Said’s quiet insistence that his book was above all a
humanist one tended to go unnoticed by readers, or, if it was noticed, it
was only as something of an intellectual embarrassment, an analytical
archaism to be passed over as swiftly as possible. Said, however, remained
a determined, unrepentant humanist for the rest of his life, and it is no
coincidence that the last book he completed before his death was
Humanism and Democratic Criticism. At the simplest level, Humanism
and Democratic Criticism embodies the future of Orientalism, carrying its
humanist impulse and analysis forward a quarter of a century. At a more
complex level, its analysis of the nature of humanism in the twenty-first
century, the tasks and responsibilities facing humanists, gives some sense of
the shape of a much-needed engine of survival.
With the idea of Humanism and Democratic Criticism as an important
part of the future of Orientalism, I would like to say a little about how it
responds to issues raised so far in this essay, as well as how it extends the
discussion. One of the first things to note is that, for Said, twenty-first-
century humanism is not what it was: subject to a kind of Brechtian
umfunktionierung, it emerges as pre-eminently a form of critique.
“Principally it means situating critique at the very heart of humanism,
critique as a form of democratic freedom and as a continuous practice of
questioning and of accumulating knowledge that is open to, rather than in
denial of, the constituent historical realities of the post-Cold War world, its
early colonial formation, and the frighteningly global reach of the last
remaining superpower of today.”11
Humanist critique for Said is an interventionist mode, a sphere of
agency for the intellectual: “What concerns me is humanism as a usable
praxis for intellectuals and academics who want to know what they are
doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who also want to
“The Engine of Survival”: A Future For Orientalism 351
connect these principles to the world in which they live as citizens” (p. 6).
As critique and praxis, humanism is above all an urgently needed form of
resistance: “For if, as I believe, there is now taking place in our society an
assault on thought itself, to say nothing of democracy, equality, and the
environment, by the dehumanizing forces of globalization, neoliberal
values, economic greed (euphemistically called the free market), as well
as imperialist ambition, the humanist must offer alternatives now silenced
or unavailable through the channels of communication controlled by a tiny
number of news organizations” (p. 71). The resistance to these oppressive
forces is carried out in the name of the human and in order to bring about a
more humane state of being. In opposition to the dehumanizing exclusions
of Orientalism, imperialism, racism, or xenophobic nationalism, human-
ism offers a vision and a practice that is all-embracing, inclusive – even
loving?
In case this is sounding a little utopian, Said repeats his Pierce-and-
abduction position in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and we can
repeat the conviction that he is in fact proposing a project that Bloch would
recognize precisely as utopian and of the best sort: practically grounded,
humanly oriented, an engine of survival in our troubled times. Other
postcolonial humanists have produced more unquestionably utopian
plans: Fanon in the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth famously
calls for nothing less than the creation of a new humanity (or, as he
repeatedly says, “a new man”).12 Said remains more cautious.
One reason for the caution is Palestine. One of Majid’s most
ungenerous moments is to suggest, somewhat snidely, that “[Said]
has managed, in a brilliant literary coup, to reify his own struggles
with the issues of Palestine into a global theory that has ensnared
generations of scholars and militants, including those in the Arab-
Muslim world, the sphere of his native culture.” While that reification
assessment has nothing whatsoever to do with the book that the
comments notionally address, it is obviously true that the question
of Palestine troubled Said for the remainder of his post-Orientalism
life. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Palestine presents itself as
an example of how “some dialectical oppositions are not reconcilable,
not transcendable, not really capable of being folded into a sort of
higher, undoubtedly nobler synthesis” (p. 143). That the obstacle
appears currently immovable is not, however, any reason in Said’s
eyes to stop working toward the day when his increasingly
Orientalized, dehumanized and routinely oppressed people might
achieve peace and freedom. That involves handing on the task and
352 patrick williams
the struggle to others, including his friend Mahmoud Darwish. In his
moving elegy for Said, Darwish includes this exchange:
He also said: If I die before you,
my will is the impossible.
I asked: Is the impossible far off?
He said: A generation away.13
Ensuring the continuing struggle for the achievement of the “impossible”
for the good of all of us seems an altogether appropriate legacy for the
author of Orientalism.

Notes
1. Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 23.
2. Runnymead Trust, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, 1997.
3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 326.
4. See Anouar Majid, “Reply to Joseph and Mayer: Critique as Dehegemonizing
Practice,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23:2 (Winter 1998):
pp. 377-389.
5. Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reﬂections on Qur’an, Hadith, and
Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006).
6. For example Patrick Williams, “Postcolonialism and Orientalism,” in
Geoffrey Nash et al., eds., Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature,
Culture, Society and Film (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 48–61.
7. Said, Orientalism, p. 24.
8. Edward W. Said, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said,
ed. Gauri Viswanathan (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), pp. 51–52.
9. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and
Paul Knight, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 1: p. 145.
10. Said, Orientalism, p. 328.
11. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), p. 47.
12. Frantz, Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 255.
13. Mahmoud Darwish, “Edward Said; A Contrapuntal Reading,” Al-Ahram
Weekly, no. 710 (December 30–October 6, 2004), http://weekly.ahram.org
.eg/Archive/2004/710/cu4.htm (accessed October 10, 2017).
Further Reading

Introduction
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Idols of the East: European Representations of Islam 1100–
1450. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
App, Urs. The Birth of Orientalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2010.
Aravamudan, Srinivas. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Casanova, Pascale. The Republic of World Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Elmarsafy, Ziad, Anna Bernard and David Attwell. Debating Orientalism.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Hoeveler, Diane Long, and Jeffrey Cass, eds. Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual
Approaches and Pedagogical Practices. Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2006.
Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Lockman, Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics
of Orientalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Lewis, Reina. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation. New
York: Routledge, 1996.
Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1991.
Macﬁe, Alexander Lyon. Orientalism: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000.
Macﬁe, Alexander Lyon. Orientalism. London: Routledge, 2002.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London:
Verso, 1997.
Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the
East, 1680–1880. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Varisco, Daniel Martin. Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2007.

353
354 Further Reading
1 Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century
Ballaster, Ros. Fables of the East: Selected Tales 1662–1785. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Boone, Joseph Allen. The Homoerotics of Orientalism. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014.
Chang, Elizabeth Hope. Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in
Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Grosrichard, Alain. The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz
Heron. London: Verso, 1998.
Lach, Donald F. Asia in the Making of Europe, 2 vols. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1965–1977.
MacLean, Gerald. The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman
Empire, 1580–1720. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Markley, Robert. The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Mitter, Partha. Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian
Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Sapra, Rahul, The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of
India. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011.
Seth, Vanita. Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Smith, Woodruff D. Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800.
New York: Routledge, 2002.
Sussman, Charlotte. Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender & British
Slavery, 1713–1833. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Kaul, Suvir. Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
Tobin, Beth Fowkes. Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Art and Letters
1760–1820. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
Yang, Chi-ming. Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in
Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
2011.
Zuroski Jenkins, Eugenia. A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory
of Orientalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

2 The Origin and Development of the Oriental Tale

Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Aravamudan, Srinivas. “Fiction/Translation/Transnation.” In A Companion to the
Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, eds. Paula R. Backsheider and
Catherine Ingrassia. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 48–74.
Ballaster, Ros. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Further Reading 355
Caracciolo, Peter, ed. The Arabian Nights in English Literature. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1988.
Dew, Nicholas. Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. London: HarperCollins,
1997.
Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
Makdisi, Saree, and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. The Arabian Nights in Historical
Context: Between East and West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-
Century English Narratives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Rousseau, G. S., and Roy Porter, eds. Exoticism in the Enlightenment. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1990.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

3 Romantic Orientalism and Occidentalism

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
Butler, Marilyn. “Orientalism.” In The Penguin History of Literature: The
Romantic Period, ed. David Pirie. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994, pp.
395–447.
Cohn, Bernard. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992.
Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Krishnan, Sanjay. Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in
Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Majeed, Javed. Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India
and Orientalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Makdisi, Saree. Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial
Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792; reprt.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.

4 The Victorians: Empire and the East

Ballantyne, Tony. Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
356 Further Reading
Banerjee, Sukanya. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian
Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Bolt, Christine. Victorian Attitudes to Race. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1971.
Burton, Antoinette. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and
Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1994.
Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle
Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2006.
Mehta, Uday. Liberalism and Empire: Study in Nineteenth Century Liberal
Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991.
Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial
Venture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004.
Stocking, George W., Jr. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1987.
Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997.

5 Orientalism and Victorian Fiction

Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Bivona, Daniel. Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in
Victorian Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.
Bivona, Daniel. British Imperial Literature, 1870–1940: Writing and the
Administration of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in
India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Sramek, Joseph. Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765 to 1858. New
York: Palgrave, 2011.
Sreenivas, Mytheli. Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in
Colonial India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race.
London: Routledge, 1995.

6 Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites

Arvidsson, Stefan. Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Further Reading 357
Bryant, Edwin. The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan
Migration Debate. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Bryant, Edwin, and Laurie Patton, eds. Indo-Aryan Controversy Evidence and
Inference In Indian History. London: Routledge, 2005.
Gobineau, Comte de. Comte de Gobineau and Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings,
ed. Geoffrey Nash, trans. Daniel O’Donoghue. London: Routledge, 2009.
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and
Their Inﬂuence on Nazi Ideology. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004.
Hutton, Christopher. Linguistics and the Third Reich: Race, Mother-tongue Fascism
and the Science of Language. London: Routledge, 1999.
McGetchin, Douglas. Indolology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s
Rebirth in Modern Germany. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2009.
Poliakov, Léon. The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in
Europe, trans. E. Howard. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
Rose, Paul Lawrence. German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism
from Kant to Wagner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Thapar, Romila, et al. India: Historical Beginnings and the Concept of the Aryan.
Essays. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007.
Trautmann, Thomas, ed. The Aryan Debate. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2005.
Trautmann, Thomas. Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial
Madras. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

7 Orientalism and the Bible

Anidjar, Gil. The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003.
Anidjar, Gil. Semites: Race, Religion, Literature, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2008.
Kalman, Julie. Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture, and Imperialism in
Nineteenth-Century France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
Kalmar, Ivan. Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power.
London: Routledge, 2012.
Kalmar, Ivan, and David Penslar, eds. Orientalism and the Jews. Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, 2005.
Librett, Jeffrey S. Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2015.
Peleg, Yaron. Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005.
Shaffer, E. S. “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical
Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880. Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Sugirtharajah, R. S. Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: History, Method,
Practice. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
358 Further Reading
Wilcox, Andrew. Orientalism and Imperialism: From Nineteenth-Century Missionary
Imaginings to the Contemporary Middle East. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

8 Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject

Appignanesi, Lisa, and Sara Maitland, eds. The Rushdie File. London: Fourth
Estate, 1989.
Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Bhabha, Homi K., and W. J. T. Mitchell, eds. Edward Said: Continuing the
Conversation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Byrne, Eleanor. Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Palgrave, 2009.
Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. London: Routledge,
2004.
Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1952].
Said, Edward W. Reﬂections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays.
London: Granta, 2000.
Suleri, Sarah. The Rhetoric of English India. University of Chicago Press: Chicago
and London, 1993.
Young, Robert J. C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London:
Routledge, 1990.
Zizek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reﬂections. London: Verso, 1999.

9 The Harem: Gendering Orientalism

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society.
Oakland: University of California Press, 2000 [1986].
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013.
Almila, Anna-Mari, and David Inglis, eds. The Routledge International Handbook
to Veils and Veiling Practices. London: Routledge, 2018.
Khabeer, Su‘ad Abdul. Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United
States. New York: New York University Press, 2016.
Le Renard, Amelie. A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and
Reform in Saudi Arabia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.
Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report 2015.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Renne, Elisha P., ed. Veiling in Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

10 Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing

Behdad, Ali. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
Further Reading 359
Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to
“Culture,” 1800–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Melman, Billie. Women’s Orient: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
Nash, Geoffrey. From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East 1830–1926.
London: I. B. Tauris, 2005.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Spurr, David. Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel
Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1993.

11 Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Orientalism

Aldridge, Alfred Owen. The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the
American Enlightenment. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993.
Chisolm, Lawrence W. Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1963.
Christy, Arthur. The Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study of Emerson,
Thoreau, and Alcott. New York: Octagon Books, 1969.
Jackson, Carl T. Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United
States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Kern, Robert. Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem. Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
Lan, Feng. Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of
Modernity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
Lye, Colleen. America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005.
McClellan, Robert. The Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes toward
China, 1890–1905. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971.
Prebish, Charles S., and Kenneth K. Tanaka, eds. Faces of Buddhism in America.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Qian, Zhaoming. Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and
Williams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Riepe, Dale. The Philosophy of India and Its Impact on American Thought.
Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1970.
Rayapati, J. P. Rao, Early American Interest in Vedanta. New York: Asia Publishing
House, 1973.
Snodgrass, Judith. Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism,
Occidentalism, and the Columbia Exposition. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2003.
Weir, David. American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era
through the Twentieth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2011.
360 Further Reading
12 Edward Said and Resistance in Colonial and Postcolonial
Literatures
Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1994.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory
and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1998.
Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995.
Childs, Peter, and Patrick Williams. An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory.
London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997.
Gilbert, Helen, ed. Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology. London: Routledge, 2001.
Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998.
Poddar, Prem, and David Johnson, eds. A Historical Companion to
Postcolonial Literatures in English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2005.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays 1981–1991. London: Granta, 1991.
Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Vintage, 1984.
Said, Edward W. “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,”
Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): pp. 205–225.
Said, Edward W. “Third-World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture,” Raritan
9:3 (1990): pp. 27–50.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a
History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999.

13 Can the Cosmopolitan Writer Be Absolved of Racism?

Brennan, Timothy. Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Firchow, Peter Edgerly. Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
Lorcin, Patricia. Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Race and Identity in Colonial
Algeria. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995.
Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2017.
O’Brien, Conor Cruise. Albert Camus of Europe and Africa. New York: Viking,
1970.
Rubin, Andrew. Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist
Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1987.
Further Reading 361
Vulor, Ena C. Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses: Albert Camus and Algeria, an
Intertextual Dialogue with Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, and
Mohhammed Dib. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000.

14 From Orientalism to Islamophobia

Allen, Chris. Islamophobia. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Kumar, Deepa. Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 2012.
Kundnani, Arun. The Muslism are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the
Domestic War on Terror. New York: Verso, 2014.
Morgan, George, and Scott Poynting, eds. Global Islamophobia: Muslims and
Moral Panic in the West. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.
Runnymede Trust. Islamophobia, A Challenge for Us All: Report of the Runnymede
Trust Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. Runnymede Trust,
April 1997.
Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine
How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Tuastad, Dag. “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic
Violence in the Middle East Conﬂict(s).” Third World Quarterly 24:4 (2003): pp.
591–599.
Tyrer, David. The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy. London: Pluto
Press, 2013.

15 Applications of Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia

in Recent Writing
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013.
Dabashi, Hamid. Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror. New
Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2015.
Esposito, John L., and Kalin, Ibrahim. Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in
the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Gottschalk, Peter, and Gabriel Greenberg. Islamophobia: Making Muslims the
Enemy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 2008.
Kumar, Deepa. Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Chicago: Haymarket Books,
2012.
Lean, Nathan. The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of
Muslims. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
Sayyid, Salman, and AbdoolKarim Vakil, eds. Thinking Through Islamophobia:
Global Perspectives. London: Hurst and Company, 2010.
362 Further Reading
Sheehi, Stephen. Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims.
Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2011.
Shyrock, Andrew. Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and
Friend. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

16 Orientalism and Cultural Translation: Middle Eastern

American Writing
Amireh, Amal, and Lisa Suhair Majaj, eds. Going Global: The Transnational
Reception of Third World Women Writers. New York: Garland, 2000.
Berman, Jacob. American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century
Imaginary. New York: NYU Press, 2012.
Gana, Nouri, ed. The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The
Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Gregory, Derek. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2004.
Hassan, Waïl. Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation
in Arab American and Arab British Literature. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011.
Jamal, Amaney, and Nadine Naber, eds. Race and Arab Americans before and after
9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2008.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the
Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon, 2004.

17 New Orientalism and the American Media: New York

Cleopatra and Saudi “Giggly Black Ghosts”
Al-Ghadeer, Moneera. “Cannibalizing Iraq: Topos of Orientalism.” In
Debating Orientalism, eds. David Attwell, Anna Bernard and Ziad Elmarsafy.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 117–133.
Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem, trans. M. Godzich and W. Godzich.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Danforth, Loring M. Crossing the Kingdom: Portraits of Saudi Arabia. Berkeley:
University of of California Press, 2016.
Djebar, Assia. Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. Marjolijn de Jager.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
Little, Arthur L. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-imperial Re-visions of Race,
Rape, and Sacriﬁce. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Further Reading 363
18 On Orientalism’s Future(s)
Berkey, Jonathan P. The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East,
600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Crone, Patricia, and Michael Cook. Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Donner, Fred M. Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Holland, Tom. In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the
Global Arab Empire. New York: Doubleday, 2012.
Irwin, Robert. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. Woodstock,
NY: The Overlook Press, 2006.
Majid, Anouar. Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-
Andalusian Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Ohlig, Karl-Heinz, and Gerd-R. Puin, eds. The Hidden Origins of Islam: New
Research into Its Early History. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010.
Shoemaker, Stephen J. The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and
the Beginnings of Islam. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

19 “The Engine of Survival”: A Future for Orientalism

Achcar, Gilbert. Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism. London: Saqi, 2013.
Burke, Edmund, and David Prochaska, eds. Genealogies of Orientalism: History,
Theory, Politics. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
Iskander, Adel, and Hakem Rustom, eds. Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation
and Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Said, Edward W. After the Last Sky. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.
Said, Edward W. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Said, Edward W. Covering Islam. New York: Vintage, 1997.
Said, Edward W. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, 2003.
Turner, Bryan. Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism. London: Routledge,
1994.
Williams, Patrick, ed. Edward Said, 4 vols. London: Sage, 2001.
Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, 2010.
Index

Abdel-Malek, Anouar, Orientalism in Crisis, 25 The History of Women, 59

Achcar, Gilbert, 25 Algeria, 19, 242
Achebe, Chinua, 18–19, 226–227, 235, 236–239, French conquest of, 195
242, 247 independence, 19, 242, 248
Addison, Joseph, 45, 51, 53 Meursault (Daoud on Camus), 236, 247–248
The Vision of Mirzah, 52 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 275, 278, 294, 295
Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo, The (Eliza Alloula, Malek, 183, 318
Haywood), 54 Al-Qaeeda (Al-Qaida), 263, 281
Aeschylus, 2, 186 America. See the United States
The Persians, 4, 269 American journalism, 23
Afghanistan, 23, 169, 271, 276–278, 279–281, 289, media, 23–25
292, 294 American Oriental Society, 17, 205, 208
2001 invasion of, 23, 274, 288 American Orientalism, 1, 16–18, 23–25, 202, 203,
Afghans, 111 204, 205, 208–209, 211, 216, 289, 308, 316
Africa, 10, 80, 107, 239 American War of Independence, 8
African studies, 327–328 Ancient Greece, 31
Camus, 243 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe, 6, 11,
Conrad, 19, 226–227, 243 119–120, 134
Ham, 118 anthropology, 3, 9–10, 85, 92, 94, 124–125
nationalism, 241 anti-colonial resistance. See Resistance
North, 3, 103, 173, 242, 289 anti-Semitism, 22, 119, 121, 126, 261
Algeria, 242 Antonius, George
Religions, 145 The Arab Awakening, 221–222
sub-Saharan, 102 App, Urs, 11, 47
African writers and postcolonialism, 228, 231 Arab American, 295
Achebe, 18, 226–227 identity, 290, 292, 293, 296–297, 299–301
Ngugi, 18, 222–223, 224, 228–231 literature, 295–297, 299
Ahmad, Aijaz, 26 writers/writing, 24, 292, 295–296, 297–299, 301
In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 18, 19, Arab nationalism, 26, 325
26, 235, 338 Arab Spring, the, 24
Ahmad, Eqbal, 338 2011, 282, 308, 309, 315
Ahmed, Leila, 178, 274 Arabia, Arabs, 328
Women and Gender in Islam, 284 Arabia, 80, 191, 195
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, 5 Arabs, 9, 11, 17, 22, 23, 41, 68, 189, 243–244,
Idols of the East, 5 286–289
al-‘Azm, Sadik Jalal, 25 Saudi Arabia, 307–308, 311–312
Orientalism in reverse, 25 Arabian Nights, (Alf layla wa layla), 7–8, 48
Alatas, S. H. Arabic, 69, 77, 122, 123, 139–140, 141–142, 158–159,
The Myth of the Lazy Native, 221–222 196, 204, 208, 289, 296, 314, 324
Alexander, the Great, 35 Aramaic, 35
Alexander, William, 62 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 6–8, 42, 48, 54, 57

364
Index 365
Aryan, Aryans, Aryanism, 10, 12, see also British artists in India, 7, 43
Indo-Aryan, European, Germanic Broca, Paul, 124
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin Bronte, Charlotte
The Empire Writes Back, 223 Jane Eyre, 86
Asiatic Barred Zone Act (Immigration Act, Brown, Lancelot “Capability,” 46
1917), 203 Buddhism, 3, 17, 145, 205, 207, 209, 215, see also
Aubin, Penelope Zen-Buddhism
The Noble Slaves: Or, The Lives and Adventures Budgell, Eustace, 52
of Two Lords and Two Ladies, who were Burke, Edmund, 46, 74–76, 78
shipwreck’d, 53 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 75
Austen, Jane Burkhardt, Jean Louis, 194
Mansfield Park, 13, 18, 225, 247 burqa, 169, 174, 278, See also veil
Burton, Richard, 16, 102, 186, 195–196
Baedeker’s guides, 198–199 Bush, George W.
Bage, Robert administration, 21
The Fair Syrian, 59–60 Butler, Judith, 152, 313
Bahramitash, Roksana, 283 Byrne, Eleanor, 14, 151
Bakhtin, Mikail, 152 Byron, Lord
Ballaster, Ros, 6, 8, 51, 62 Turkish tales, 71
Banerjee, Sukanya, 9–10, 11, 82
Baptists, 206–207 Calcutta, 58, 83, 206, 207
Barbara Harlow, 219 Cambridge, Richard Owen, 57
Barnum, P.T., 17, 203, 205 Camus, Albert, 242–244
Bar-Yousef, Eitan, 11 L’Étranger (The Outsider/The Stranger), 19,
Batchelor, Robert, 39, 40 235–236, 242, 243
Bayley, C.A., 97 Canada, 86
Beattie, James, 59 Canton, 83
Beckford, William Capability Brown, Lancelot, 46
Vathek, 60–61 Caribbean, the, 86
Behdad, Ali, 15–16, 185, 257–258 Carlyle, Thomas, 107
Beirut Carter, Jimmy, 204
civil war of 1975–76, 24, 307 Casanova, Pascale, 20
Benedict Anderson, 79, 342 The World Republic of Letters, 20
Bhabha, Homi, 18, 26, 151 Cass, Jeffrey, 12
The Location of Culture, 13–14, 151, 152, 153, 224 Celtic languages, 120, 122
Bhagavad-Gita, 69, 209–210, 213–214 Césaire, Aimé, 13, 221
Bible, 35, 133–145, 157, 207, See also Orientalism Chaldean, 141, 209
Bin Laden, Osama, 280, 281, 306 Chambers, Sir William, 45–46
Blavatsky, Madame, 17, 127 Chang Yu Sing, 203, 205
Bloch, Ernst, 348–349, 351 Chang, Elizabeth, 45
Bloom, Harold, 144, 163 Chardin, Jean, 187
Boehmer, Elleke, 18, 223 Charlie Hebdo, 328–329, 333
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 5 Chateaubriand, François-René, Vicomte de, 24,
Book of Job, 142 134, 136, 143, 307
Bopp, Franz, 123, 136, 208 Childs, Peter, 13
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 210 China (and Chinese), 7, 17, 35–40, 44–46
Brantlinger, Patrick, 238 Exclusion Act of 1882, 17, 203
Britain, (and British Orientalism), 1–3, see also history, 20, 39–40
Orientalism and Empire Ming and Qing emperors, 36, 46
colonialism, 123, 227, 229 Chinese landscaping styles, 7, 45
empire in the East, 8, 9, 40, 58, 82, 84, 85–87, Chinese Tales, 50
89–90, 94, 101, 103, 107, 137 chinoiserie, 39, 44, 57
liberalism, 85, 90 Chippendale, Thomas
rule in India, 3, 6, 44, 161, 334 The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s
trade with the Orient, 36–39 Director, 45
366 Index
Christians, Christianity, 6, 11–12, 53, 79, 105–106, Daoud, Kamel, 329
133, 135–137, 140, 141, 143–145, 159, 202, The Meursault Investigation, 236, 247
208, 214, 324, 328, 332, 335 Darby, Philip, 224, 225, 227–228
Christendom, 67 Darwinism, Darwinian theory, 11, 124
Christian missionaries, 78–79, 87, 136, 141, 158, post-, 93, 126
172, 188, 202, 206–207, 208 pseudo-, 214
Christianity, 36, 38 social, 211
class, 7, 15, 26, 38–39, 88–89, 91, 105, 166, 177, 237, Darwish, Mahmoud, 221, 228, 352
249, 313 Das, Nandini, 42
empire and, 168, 171 Davis, Lennard, 239
lower (working), 107, 230, 243, 261, 345 de la Croix, François Pétis. See also Persian Tales
middle (bourgeois), 18, 68, 87, 172, 198, 200, The Thousand and One Days
219, 315 Persian Tales, 52
race, 105, 114, 127, 152, 154, 164, 168, 225, 292 De Quincey, Thomas, 82–84, 90
upper (aristocracy), 73, 105, 162, 323 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 9, 67,
Cleopatra, 306, 310 82, 86, 87
Cohn, Bernard, 70 Defoe, Daniel, 248
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 187, 190 Roxana, 8, 53
Cold War cultural critique, 19, 235, 245–246, 249 Derrida, Jacques, 152, 155–156, 163
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 61, 135, 137, 140 Dickens, Charles, 91, 102–103, 107
Collège de France, 16, 187 Hard Times, 86
Colley, Linda, 56, 79 digital activism, 25, 313–314
Collins, Wilkie, 102–103 Disraeli, Benjamin, 10, 101, 103–104, 105–107,
Moonstone, 10, 87 142–143
colonial discourse, 4, 13, 14, 40, 154–155, 156, 241 Tancred, 10, 87, 103, 104, 105–107, 142
colonial subject, 10, 13, 87, 90, 155, 160, 231 Doughty, Charles, 196
colonialism, 6, 7, 11, 18, 19, 26, 40, 44, 117, 137, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 195
224, 228, 230, 235, 238, 239, 325, 341, See Dutch, the, 1, 37, 39, 47, 347
also Britain and France, Europe and
Western East India Company, 37, 42–43, 44, 57, 69, 70, 83,
Compagnie du Levant, 187 91, 103, 108, 159, 207
Conant, Martha Pike, 51 East, the, 7, 8, 9, 17, 42, 83–84, 85, 86–87,
Confucian, 17, 205, 209 89–90, 97
Conrad, Joseph, 18, 226–227, 230, 235, 237–242, as radically distinct from the West, 2, 4, 8, 13,
245–247, 249 20, 66–67, 71, 80, 169, 273, 274, 296,
Heart of Darkness, 13, 18–19, 224–225, 226–227, 302, 316
235–236, 237–238, 239–242, 246–247, 249 Edib, Halidé, 173, 174
Lord Jim, 10, 103–104, 112, 114 Egypt, 35, 172, 193, 197, 198–199
Constantinople, 119, 166, 174, 197–198, 199 French invasion of, 4, 5
Cooke, Miriam, 274 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 147
Coryat, Thomas, 187 Eldem, Edhem, 30, 177
Coventry, Francis, 54 Eliot, George, 244
Crawfurd, John, 9, 85–86, 92, 93–97 Daniel Deronda, 10, 103, 104, 105–108
President of the Ethnological Society, 86, 92 Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 17, 205, 213–214,
Cromer, Lord, 8, 66–68, 80, 102, 255 215, 245
Modern Egypt, 66, 68 Ellison, Grace, 173, 174, 177
cultural translation, 23, 286, 304, 305 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 17, 205, 207–209,
215
D’Israeli, Isaac, 61 Engels, Friedrich, 27
Dabashi, Hamid, 27–28, 258, 270, 273, 282 English literature, 3, 41, 88, 159, 303
Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Englishness, 46, 60, 88–89
Time of Terror, 27 Englishwomen in the novel, 87
Dabschelim, Indian king, 51 Enlightenment, 9, 42, 118, 169, 332
Dante, 2, 4, 186, 213 Enlightenment Orientalism, 6, 54
Inferno, 5 secular/post, 136, 161
Index 367
the, 136, 236, 332–333 Gallien, Claire, 5, 6
writers, 74 Ganguli, Debjani, 20
Ethnological Society, 9, 86, 92–93, 94, 95–96, 124 Gaskell, Elizabeth
eunuchs, 15, 167, 173 Mary Barton, 86
Euripedes, 4 Gay, John
The Bacchae, 4 To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China, 38
Europe gaze, the, 197, 211, 281
Euro-centrism, 31, 333 female heterosexual, 175
European colonialism, 20, 125, 274 islamophobic, 262
evolutionary theory, 124, 128 lesbian, 175
Eyre, Governor, 89, 93, 99, 107, See also Jamaica male heterosexual, 41, 175
male/female heterosexual, 15
Fabian, Johannes orientalist rescuer, 275
Time and the Other, 190 panoptic imperial, 183
Fadda, Carol W. N., 23 western imperial, 176
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 220–221 gender, 13–15, 88–89, 109
Fanon, Frantz, 220–222, 228–230, 242, 262 harem, 166–168, 169–170, 172, 173, 175–176,
Black Skin, White Masks, 156, 261 177–178
Wretched of the Earth, 19, 219, 222, 229, 230, 351 studies, 25
Far East, 17, 39, 57, 102, 135, 202, 204–205, 206, George IV, King, and Prince of Wales, 44
208, 209–210, 214, 215–216 Germany (and German), 124
feminism, feminist studies, 3, 4, 14, 24, 110, 153, nationalism, 11, 117, 126
168, 169–171, 173, 174, 224, 274–275, Nazis, 126, 127, 143
293–294, 312, 315, 346 Orientalism, 1, 134, 145
Orientalist feminism, 166, 172, 270 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 175
Fenollosa, Ernest, 211–213 Ghadeer, Moneera, 24–25, 306
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 119 Gibbon, Edward, 40
Fielding, Henry, 54, 160, 162 Gibran, Kahlil, 296
Joseph Andrews, 54 globalization, 21, 351
Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, 37, 39 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, comte de, 117, 127, 143
Firchow, Peter, 238 Essai sur l’inégalite des races humaines, 105, 122
Flaubert, Gustave, 185, 196, 197, 255 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 20, 118, 124, 129,
Forster, E. M., 101, 221, 235 137, 140, 213
A Passage to India, 14, 160–161, 222 Goldsmith, Oliver, 55
Foucault, Michel, 2, 4, 5, 13, 16, 27, 120, 123, 152, The Citizen of the World, 51, 57
186, 194, 235–236, 257, 272, 334, 337 Gramsci, Antonio, 13, 186, 235, 236, 337–338
Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Grant, Charles, 78–79
Language, 201 Observations on the state of society among the
France (and French Orientalism), 1–3, 6, 16, 42, Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, 159
50–51, 187–188, 190, 194–195, 198 Greco-Persian wars, 4
ancien régime, 75 Greek (language), 70, 82–83, 119–120, 124,
colonialism, 19, 236, 243, 244, 286, 334 140–141, 144, 206
Franklin, Benjamin, 17, 206 Greenberg, Clement, 19, 235, 245, 249
From the Morals of Confucius, 204–205 Grimm, Jacob, 123
French literature, 16, 19, 24, 41, 51, 55, 74, 102, 134, Grosrichard, Alain, 40–41
136, 143, 174, 185, 196–198, 200, 235–236, Guha, Ranajit, 221–222
242–244, 255, 307 Gulf War, 1991, 23, 274, 288, 297
French Revolution, 118–119, 332
Frères, Abdullah, 178 Halfpenny, William and John
Freud, Sigmund, 155, 156, 160 Chinese and Gothic Architecture Properly
Ornamented, 45
Galland, Antoine, 52, 54 Hall, Radclyffe, 170
Fables of Pilpay, 7, 50–51 Hall, Stuart, 153
Les Mille et une nuits, 41–42, 48–50, See Halliday, Fred, 259
Arabian Nights Ham, 10, 118
368 Index
Hamdi, Osman, 177 liberal, 98
Hamitic, 118 Victorian, 87, 107
Hammad, Suheir, 24, 300–301 Imperialist adventure fiction, 10, 104, 225
Hanim, Nazli, 177 India, Indians, 7, 9, 14, 21, 35–37, 39, 40, 41,
Hanoum, Melek, and Zeyneb Hanoum, 173 42–44, 68, 79, 88–89, 90–91, 94, 96, 103,
harem, 14, 41 109–110, 122, 123, 125, 143, 334
harem literature, 14–15, 171, 173–174, 175, Bengal province, 42, 57, 69, 83, 221
177, 179 Bihar province, 83
Harlow, Barbara, 227–228 Indian Uprising/Mutiny, 1857, 90, 108
Harris, John Seringapatam, battle of, 87
Navigantium atque Itinerantium Biblioteca, 39 Indo-Aryan, Indo-European, Indo-Germanic, 9,
Hassan, Waïl, 296–297 11, 85, 98, 117–118, 143, 144
Hastings, Warren, Governor-General of Bengal, language family, 104, 120, 122, 126
44, 69, 71, 78 race, 106
Hawkesworth, John, 55–56 Indology, Indologists, 3, 11, 122, 135
Haywood, Eliza Iran, Iranian, 17
The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo, 54 hostage crisis, 1979–1981, 256, 271, 288, 293
Hebrew, 35, 105, 122, 124, 135, 140–142, 144, immigration to United States, 122, 293
147, 208 revolution, 1978–1979, 21, 256, 271, 288,
Heetopades (Hitopadesa) of Veeshnoo Sarma, 207 291, 293
Heffernan, Teresa, 169 Iraq, 292, 294, 295
Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 25, 142, US-led invasion, 2003, 21, 259, 288
143–145, 211–212, 334 Irwin, Robert, 327, 347
Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 143, 211 Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its
Heidegger, Martin, 255 Discontents, 324
Henley, Samuel, 60–61 ISIS
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 121, 134, 137, 141 “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” 263
Herodotus, 4, 35 Islam, Islamic world, 5, 17, 26–27, 335, 346, see also
Heron, Robert Orientalism
Arabian Tales, 8, 59 concepts, 260
Heschel, Suzannah, 143 culture, 27
hijab, 178, 299, See also veil gender, 317
Hindus, Hinduism, 3, 7, 17, 42–43, 96, 97, 105, gender conventions, 172
120, 123, 125, 145, 202, 205, 207–208, 210, law, 20
213–214, 223, 227 Orientalist clichés, 277
trimurti of Brahma, Krishna, and Vishnu, revival, 178
42–43 society, 258
Hobsbawm, Eric, 31 studies, 325, 329
Hoeveler, Diana Long, 12 tradition, 327–328, 329
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 137, 140 Islamism, Islamists, 26, 263, 315, 328, 334, 343, 344
Holy Land, the, 11, 139, 143, 202 Islamophobia, 4, 21–23, 255, 259, 261, 263, 269
Hugo, Victor, 2, 186 Runnymede Trust Report, 1997, 259, 344
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 124, 143
Hunt, Leigh, 62 Jamaica, 93
London Journal, 65 slave revolt, 1865, 89, 93, 107
Huntington, Samuel, 22, 257, 272 uprising at Morant Bay, 1849, 89
Hutton, Christopher, 10–11, 117 Jameson, Fredric, 114, 227, 228
Japan, Japanese, 17, 35–36, 37, 56–57, 120, 139,
immigrant fiction, 231, 288, 293, 296–297 205, 210–211, 212–213, 214
Imperialism, 6, 13, 168, 190 Edo and Tokugawa shogunate, 36, 46
British, 323 Japhet, Japhetic, 10–11, 117–118, 121,
Culture, 18–19, 219, 220–221, 222–224, 122
225–226, 227–228, 231 Jasanoff, Maya, 44
European, 102 Jefferson, Thomas, 17, 204–206, 212
free trade, 103 Jerichau-Baumann, Elisabeth, 171, 177
Index 369
Jesus, 143, 144, 206 London Corresponding Society, 68
search for “Aryan Jesus,” 143 Long, Andrew C., 19, 235
Jews, 11, 36, 106, 107, 108, 118–119, 121, 126, 128, Lorcin, Patricia M. E., 244
138–139, 142, 144 Loti, Pierre, 197
jihad, jihadism, 260, 263, 264, 271, 333–334 Les Désenchantées, 174
John of Segovia, 4 Lott, Emmeline, 172
Johnson, Samuel, 8, 54–56 Lowe, Lisa, 14
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, Lowth, Robert, 137, 141–142
55–56 Lukacs, Georg, 236, 249
Johnstone, Charles Lustful Turk, The, 102
The Pilgrim, 58 Lyttelton, George
The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis, 58 Letters from a Persian in England, 54
Jokic, Olivera, 5, 6
Jones, Sir William, 6, 7, 9, 11, 61, 70–71, 78, 85, Macaulay, Thomas, 68, 76–79
94, 96, 97, 105, 119–121, 136, 208 Minute on Indian Education, 77, 159
A Hymn to Camdeo, 42–43 Maclean, Gerald, 48
Judaism, 105, 106, 140, 142, 143–145, 261, 335 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 289
Mahmood, Saba, 181, 184
Kahf, Mohja, 24, 273, 302 Majeed, Javed, 69
54 Emails from Scheherazad, 299 Majid, Anouar, 26–28, 323, 338–347, 350, 351
The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, 300 Makdisi, Saree, 8–9, 41
Kalmar, Ivan, 11–12, 133 Malay, 95
Kaplan, Robert, 257 De Quincey, 9, 67, 82–83
Kapoor, Anish, 153 Mamdani, Mahmood, 263
Karim, Persis, 293 Manji, Irshad, 278
Kaul, Suvir, 6, 7, 8, 35 Mannheim, Karl, 27
Kennedy, Valerie, 18–19, 219 Marana, Giovanni
Keshavarz, Fatemeh, 275 Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy at Paris, 51
Kiernan, V. G., 114 Markley, Robert, 39
Kipling, Rudyard, 18, 111, 249, 281 Marx, Karl, 2, 25–26, 28, 236, 325–326, 338, 340,
Kim, 13, 101, 103, 110, 221, 225 342, 345, 348, see also Said and Marxism
Without Benefit of Clergy, 10, 103, 110 Religion, 334
Knox, Robert, 124 The British Rule in India, 323, 334–335
Kundnani, Arun, 260, 262 medieval studies (and Orientalism), 4, 5
Mehta, Uday, 90
La Convivencia, 271 Mein Kampf, 127
Lacan, Jacques, 152, 160 Melman, Billie, 14, 15, 172, 174
Lampert-Weissig, Lisa, 4 Mernissi, Fatima, 170, 174
Landry, Donna, 60 Metcalf, Thomas, 100
Lane, Edward William, 11, 102, 139, 172 Michaelis, Johann David, 142
Account of the Manners and Customs of the Middle Ages, 5, 328
Modern Egyptians, 197 Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 289
Lane-Poole, Sophia, 139, 172 Middle East studies, 327
Lebanon, 178, 295 Middle East, Middle Eastern, 17, 18, 21, 23–24, 84,
civil war, 1975–1990, 24, 288, 295, 300, 307 173–174
Levant, the, 59, 103, 105, 108, 188, 289, 295 American writing, 23–24, 286, 288, 291–293,
Lewis, Bernard, 22, 257, 272, 347 295, 296, 297–299, 301
Lewis, Reina, 14–15, 166 education, 158, 172
Linnaeus, Carl gender, 167, 170
Systema naturae, 190 migrants, 23, 292
Locke, John, 52 travel writing, 185–188, 190, 192, 194–195,
Lockman, Zachary, 20 200
London, 53–54, 67 Mill, John Stuart, 10, 90
Blitz, 214 Mills, Sara, 14, 169
commerce, 8, 39 Ming dynasty, 36, 46, See also China
370 Index
Missionaries. See “Christian missionaries” under Neo-Orientalism, 4, 21–22, 255–257, 269–271,
“Christians, Christianity” 273–274, 281, 282, 287, 298, see also
Mogul Tales, 50 “Orientalism”
Moluccas, the, 36 Nerval, Gérard de, 16, 196–198, 307
Montagu, Lady Wortley, 14, 168, 172 Voyage en Orient, 24, 196
Embassy Letters, 15 New England Unitarians and
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 41, Transcendentalists, 206
74, 102 Transcendentalists, 205
Persian Letters, 51, 53 Unitarians, 202, 205
Monticello, 205 New York Times, 24, 306, 308–309, 310, 311, 315,
Moore, Thomas 316–317, 327
Lalla Rookh, 61–62 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 13, 18, 219, 220, 222–223,
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 8 227, 228–231, 237
Morey, Peter, 22–23, 269 Decolonizing the Mind, 19, 224, 228–229
Morocco, 174, 327, 328–329, 331, 343, 344 Nicholas of Cusa, 4
Mosaic triad, 10, 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 19, 240, 241
Moses, 135, 142 novel, the, 2, 7, 19
Moussa, Sarga, 137 eighteenth-century, 8, 248
Mufti, Aamir, 20–21, 231 romantic, 4, 13, 225
Mughals, 36, 40, 44, 45, 46, 110, 123 Victorian, 9, 86–87
Muhammad, (Mohammed), the Prophet, 5, Nussbaum, Felicity, 41
324, 333
Mujahideen, 271 O’Keeffe, John
Müller, Friedrich Max, 9, 11, 85, 94, 96, 97, 122, The Dead Alive, Aladdin, The Little Hunch-
124–125 Back or a Frolic in Bagdad, 59
Murray, John, 172 Obama, Barack, 271, 308
Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Occident, Occidental, 13, 36, 46, 66–67, 72,
Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, and 78, 80
Constantinople, 198–199 Occident, the, 2–3, 5, 75, 186, 189, 256, 286
Muslim, Muslims, 21, 36 Occidentalism, Occidentalist, 9, 67–68, 72,
fashion industry, 15, 167 79–80
microblogging Saudi women, 24, 307–308, in the Romantic age, 8, 66–69, 77
312–313 oil crisis of 1973, 21, 256
“misery memoirs,” 270, 275 Orient, the, 2, 4, 5, 17, 25, 46, 66, 71–73, 75, 82
modest fashion, 167, 178–179 Oriental languages, 1, 16, 187, 192–193, 208
representation of (as ‘Other’), 21, 24 Oriental Renaissance, 6, 11, 119, 134, 135, 137, 138
“saving Muslim women,” 23, 262, 270, 274, Oriental style, 45, 75
279, 294, 311 Oriental tale, 4, 7–8, 42, 50–51, 57, 58, 61, 62
self-fashioning, 170, 178, 186 Orientalism, 8, 11–12, 13–14, 15–17, 19–20, 25–28,
veiling fashions, 170–171 40, 185
Mutman, Mahmut, 21–22, 255 Afterword to the 1995 reprinting
Orientalism, Orientalism
Nafisi, Azar, 258 and the Bible, 142
Reading Lolita in Tehran, 257, 274 Orientalism, Orientalist, 1–3, 7
Naipaul, V. S., 21, 163–164, 236, 241 and (Middle East) travel writing, 4, 9, 12,
Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 176 15–16, 41, 169, 185–188, 190, 194–195,
Naoroji, Dadabhai, 9, 86, 92, 93, 95–98 198, 200
Observations on Mr John Crawfurd’s Paper on and colonialism, 11, 19, 40, 244
the European and Asiatic Races, 85 and culture and power, 2, 9, 16, 84–85, 98,
Napoleon I, 4, 118–119 185–186, 190, 192
Nash, John, 45 and empire, 4, 8, 35, 36, 82, 84, 85, 89, 349
native informants, 22 and literary studies, 1–2, 3, 20–21, 152, 286
Negrophobia, 22, 261 and race, 8, 10, 117, 122, 123–124, 125–126,
Neo-classicism, 43 302, 351
Neo-conservative writing, 22, 256, 260 and the arts, 1, 7, 18, 42–46, 78, 210
Index 371
and the Bible, 10–12, 133, 134–136, 137, Pound, Ezra, 17, 205, 211–213, see also American
139–141, 145 Orientalism
and the eighteenth-century traveler, Pratt, Mary Louise, 18, 169, 190, 219, 222, 224
191–192, 193 Pratt, Samuel Jackson
and the romantic traveler, 196–198 The Fair Circassian, 55
Anglicists and Evangelicals (in India), 84 Proclamation, by the Queen in Council, to the
as field of scholarship, 1, 9, 84–85, 86, 98, 119, Princes, Chiefs, and People of India
134, 141 (1858), 91
Enlightenment, 6, 54, 136, 236, 332–333 Protestant evangelicalism, 11
fiction, 10, 54, 57, 59, 102, 104, 114 psycho-analysis, psychoanalytic literary theory,
image of Islam, “Muslim/Oriental mind,” 14, 152, 155
21–22, 133, 256–258, 260, 263, 272
in the eighteenth century, 1, 4, 5–8, 10, 11, 16, Qing emperors, 36, 46
35, 36–37, 38, 39, 40–46, 69, 119, 190, 204 Quetin’s Guide en Orient, 198
in the Romantic age, 4, 6, 8, 9, 61, 71–72, 75, Quinet, Edgar, 137, 138
102, 119, 135, 137, 138, 271
latent and manifest, 12, 13, 154 race and racism, 4, 8, 13, 19, 23, 35, 125, 126, 226,
neo-, 4, 21–22, 24, 255–257, 264, 269–271, 227, 229, 231, 235–236, 238–240, 241, 243,
273–274, 275, 281, 282, 286, 287, 290, 294, 244, 247, 248, 261–262, 282, 287, 295, 298,
298, 301–302, 311 302, 333, 351, see also Orientalism and race
post-, 25, 27, 166, 236, 270, 351 racial anthropology, 11, 124, 125–127
Orientalist: A Volume of Tales after the Eastern Rambler, 54–55
Taste, The, 56 Razak, Sherene, 169
Orr, Bridget, 41 Reform Act
Ottoman, Ottomans, (and Ottoman empire), 7, First (1832), 76
41, 51, 176, 189, 190, 204, 295 Second (1867), 87
modernity, 177 Regency style, 45
Orientalism, 56, 177 Renan, Ernest, 11, 12, 16, 124–126, 138–139, 140,
women, 15, 53, 166, 172–173, 175, 177, 178, 189 142, 143–145, 194
Ouseley, William, 61 General History and Comparative System of the
Semitic Languages, 138
Paine, Tom, 68, 74–76, 332 Repton, Humphrey, 45
The Rights of Man, 74 Resistance, resistance literature, 13, 18, 26, 221,
Palestine, Palestinian, 11, 18, 107–108, 163, 191, 222–223, 225, 227–229
198, 219, 220, 222, 228, 235, 236, 242, 244, Retzius, Andres, 124
246–247, 269, 295, 300–301, 323, 325, 351 Rhys, Jean
Peabody, Elizabeth, 209 Wide Sargasso Sea, 18, 225
Peirce, Leslie P., 166–167 Richardson, Samuel, 54
Persia, Persians, 35, 40, 41, 46, See also Iran Ridley, James
Persian (language), 11, 21, 42, 120, 121, 123 Tales of the Genii, 58
Persian Tales, 50 Rihani, Ameen, 296
Persianists, 11, 135 Roberts, Mary, 15, 174–175
Phillips, Caryl, 236, 247, 249 Rodinson, Maxime, 25
Philology, 9, 11, 122, 125, 126, 127–133, 135, 137, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, 25
139–140, 145, 192, 208 Romantic Orientalism, 4, 8, 66, 135, 137, See also
Pictet, Adolphe, 122 Romanticism
Pipes, Daniel, 22, 257 Romanticism, 6, 8, 68, 69, 71, 77, 121, 124, see also
Pococke, Edward, 141 Romantic Orientalism
polygenism, 93 Roy, Rammohun, 206–207
Porter, David, 39–40, 45, 57 Royal Geographical Society of London, 195
postcolonial studies, postcolonialism, 3–4, 8, 13, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, 44
14, 18–19, 20, 25, 26, 153, 219, 220, 224, Rushdie, Salman, 21, 153, 220, 230–231, 236–237,
226, 269, 312, 327, 343 241, 323
postmodernism, 151 Rushdie Affair, 21
poststructuralism, 14, 27, 152, 343 Ruskin, John, 107
372 Index
Russia, 104, 111 The Bookseller of Kabul, 23, 274, 275–276, 281
Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, 107 Semites, Semitic, 10, 12, 117–118, 122, 124–125, 126,
134, 138–140, 141, 143–144
Sacy, Silvestre, Baron de, 11, 16, 139–140, 194 September 11, 2011, 24, 290, 294, 306, 309, 311
Safavid dynasty/empire, 189, 190 Seven Years’ War, 56, 57
Said, Edward, 1–6, 8, 9, 11, 16–17, 18–20, 21, 22, sexuality, 10, 13, 103, 154, 156, 169, 174–176,
25–28, 35, 40 260–261
After the Last Sky, 220 and china(ware), 7, 38
and Frantz Fanon, 19, 219, 220–222, 242, 351 harem, 15, 166–167
and Marxism, 25–28, 236, 337, 340, 342 Shaffer, Emily, 135–137
and Palestine, 163, 219, 220, 222, 228, 235, 236, Shakespeare, William, 213, 222
242, 244, 246–247, 269, 323, 325, 351 Antony and Cleopatra, 306
colleagues in comparative literature at Shakespeare Jungle Fever (Little, Arthur), 306
Columbia University, 19, 235, 245 Shebbeare, John
contrapuntal reading, 19, 221, 225, 236, 240, The History of the Excellence and Decline of the
242, 246, 249 Constitution, Religion, Laws, Manners and
Covering Islam, 21, 27, 220, 256, 257, 263, Genius of the Sumatrans, 57
269, 346 Shem, 10, 118, 122
Culture and Imperialism, 13, 18–19, 27, 86, 166, Sheridan, Frances, 56
219, 220–221, 222–224, 225–226, 227–228, Simon, Richard, 135
230, 231, 235–236, 240, 241–242, 243, 246, Sinha, Mishka, 17
249, 346 slave trade and plantation slavery, 38
on Camus and Algeria, 19, 242, 243–244, 249 Smith, William Robertson, 148
on Conrad, 18, 19, 222, 235, 239–242, 245–247 Smollett, Tobias, 57
on humanism, 18, 219, 236 The History and Adventures of an Atom, 56
Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 27, South East Asia, 83, 95, 97, 103, 105, 112
350–351 Southey, Robert, 61, 76–78, 79
Out of Place, 158 Colloquies, 76
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 240 Thalaba the Destroyer, 59, 61
The Politics of Dispossession, 220 Spectator, The, 7, 51–52
The World the Text and the Critic, 240 Spence, Joseph, 140–141
“voyage in,” 13, 18, 221–222, 227, 229, 231, 240 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 18, 169, 219, 220,
Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, 236, 224, 225–226, 227, 231, 255, 274, 311
246, 247 Steel, Flora Annie
Saint-Simonians, 137 On the Face of the Waters, 10, 103, 108, 110
Salaita, Steven, 287 Steele, Richard, and Mr. Spectator, 51
Salih, Tayeb, 220, 227, 230–231 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 158
Season of Migration to the North, 19, 219, 222, Subaltern Studies group, 220
231, 240 Suez Canal, 107
Salisbury, Edward E., 205, 208 Suleri, Sara, 162–163
Sanskrit, 7, 11, 17, 21, 42–43, 69, 77, 85, 94, 117, Suleri, Susan, 14
119, 120–121, 123, 134, 205, 208, 213 Sultan, Tipu, 87–88, 90
Saudi Arabia supersessionism, 143–145
relations with US, 308 Suzuki, D. T., 215
women, 24, 307, 309–310, 311–312, 316 Syriac, 35, 122
digital activism, 313
Savary, Claude Etienne, 16, 191–194 Tagore, Rabindranath, 203, 222
Scheler, Max, 27 Taliban, 169, 274, 276, 277, 281
Schlegel, Friedrich, 121, 136, 138, 143 Tartarian Tales, 50
Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 121 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 187, 189
Schwab, Raymond, 6, 11, 119, 134–135, 136–138 Temple, Sir William, 45
The Oriental Renaissance, 6, 11, 133, 135 Terranova, Tiziana, 22, 263–264
secularism, 9, 93, 136, 176, 179, 191, 208, 210, terrorism, 22, 257, 260, 264, 273, 327, 333
315–316, 326, 334, 338 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 102
Seierstad, Åsne Vanity Fair, 86
Index 373
Thelwall, John, 68, 76 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 41, 134
Théophile Gautier, 197 Candide, 55
Theosophy, Theosophical Society, 17, 117, 127,
145, 205 Walpole, Horace
Thévenot, Jean de, 187–188 Hieroglyphic Tales, 57
Third World intellectuals/writers, 13, 18, 19, War on Terror, 21, 22–23, 257, 264, 270, 271, 272,
236–237, 240 277, 286, 288, 293, 294, 297, 300
Third Worldism, 26 Warner, Marina, 50, 62
Thoreau, Henry David, 17, 205, Washington Post, The, 153, 308, 309, 315,
209–210 317
Thousand and One Nights. See Arabian Nights Watt, Ian, 42
Tobin, Beth Fowkes, 44 Watt, James, 7–8, 50
Tokugawa shoguns, 36, 46 Watts, Cedric, 238
Tories, 40 Weir, David, 17–18, 202
Trautmann, Thomas, 84–85 Wellhausen, Julius, 148
travel writing, 4, 9, 12, 15–16, 41, 169, 185–188, 190, Weltliteratur (world Literature), 20
194–195, 198, 224, 255, 275, See also West Indies, the, 39
Orientalism West, Western civilization, 8, 9, 17, 21, 22, 25, 39,
Trilling, Lionel, 19, 235, 245, 144, 172, 280, 287, 333
249 as radically distinct from the East, 2, 4, 8, 13,
Trump, Donald, 271, 330–331, 347 20, 169, 273, 274, 296, 302, 316
Tuastad, Dag Henrik, 22, 256–257, humanism, 18, 27, 134, 219, 236, 350–351
260 Western colonialism, 219, 326
“new barbarism” thesis, 22, 257 Western media, 21, 22, 220, 256, 258, 307, 311,
Turkey, Turks, 35, 40–41, 53, 83, 102, 187, 198, 313, 314
199, 289, 295 Westernness, Western self, 67, 71, 80
Turkish Tales, 52, 71 Whigs, 40
Wilfred Scawen Blunt, 196
United States, 1, 16–18, 23, 202, 204, 206, 208, Wilkins, Charles, 207–208, 209–210
215–216, 249, 271, 275, 327, 330–331 Williams, Patrick, 13, 27, 337
11 September, 2001 attacks, 21, 24, 290, 294, Wollstonecraft, Mary, 72–76, 79
306, 309, 311 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 72
Immigration Quota Act, 1924, 290 Women. See Orientalism, Orientalist:and
presidential election, 2016, 282 (Middle East) travel writing.
Utopia, Utopianism, 6, 42, 54, 275, 348–349, Orientalism, Orientalist:and (. . .)
351 traveler travel writing, gender:harem.
Harem, harem literature. sexuality:
Varisco, Daniel, 327, 347 harem. veil:harem, Muslim, Muslims:
Vedas, Vedic texts, 137, 206 fashion industry, modest fashion, self-
veil, 24, 139, 167, 170–171, 173, 197, 258, 262, 274, fashioning, veiling fashions, Feminism,
312, See also “burqa,” “hijab” feminist studies
harem, 15, 166, 168–169, 174 and feminism, feminist studies, 3, 24
political mobilization, 178–179 Englishwomen in the novel, 87
un-veiling, 310 in Islam and in Muslim societies, 24
Victorians, 9, 82, 90 The Englishwoman in Egypt (Sophia Lane
attitude towards empire, 84, Poole), 172
90 Wordsworth, William, 136
literature, novel, 9–10, 85, 86–87, 89–90, 91, The Prelude, 72
101–103, 104, 108, 110, 112
bildungsroman, 86 Yacine, Kateb, 21
travelogues, 10, 87, 172, 195–196, 199 Yang, Chi-ming, 39
Vietnam War, 204, 216 Yeats, William Butler, 221
Viswanathan, Gauri, 163 Yeǧ enǧ olu, Meyda Yeǧ enǧ olu, 14
Volney, Constantin-François, Comte de, 16, Young, Robert J. C., 14, 103, 152, 155,
191–193, 197, 204–205 162
374 Index
Zen-Buddhism, 17, 215 Zoffany, Johan, 43
Zend Avesta, 120, 134 Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, 43
Zhuang, Yue, 45 Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings, 7, 44
Zionism, 103, 105, 107–108, 236, 246, 247, 349 Zonana, Joyce, 172
Zizek, Slavoj, 161 Zoroastrianism, holy scriptures, 134, 137