Edward Said―Accidental Feminist

Table of contents :
Edward Said: Accidental Feminist (Sondra Hale)
Our Work Is of This World (Moustafa Bayoumi)
Edward Said: The Founder of Postcolonial Discursivity (Ali Behdad)
My Mother the Hero: Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir as Feminist Text (Anna Bernard)
“Have You Eaten?” (Rey Chow)
Edward Said in Counterpoint (Kandice Chuh)
Blood of a Slave, Heart of a King (Sohail Daulatzai)
Queering Orientalism (Rahul Gairola)
Edward Said and Asian American/Postcolonial Diaspora Studies (B. P. Giri)
Exilic Homes (Ketu H. Katrak)
The Intellectual as Exemplar: Identity, Oppositional Politics, and the Ambivalent Legacy of Edward Said (Vinay Lal)
Before and After Orientalism (Jinqi Ling)
On Edward Said (Lisa Lowe)
Orientalism: Entrances and Exits (Thu-huong Nguyen-vo)
The Man Who Confounded Congress (Vijay Prashad)
Edward Said’s Use-Value forAsian American Cultural Projects (E. San Juan)
Traveling Theory, Transforming Criticism: Edward W. Said in Taiwan (Te-hsing Shan)
Edward Said, Dispeller of Delusions (Henry Yu)

Citation preview

“Family Portrait,” acrylic and mixed media by Phung Huynh, 1999. © 2005, Phung Huynh

Before and After Orientalism

i. resistances & reflections

xix

xx

Amerasia Journal

2005

“Father Died,” oil and mixed media by Phung Huynh, 1999. © 2005, Phung Huynh

Amerasia Journal 31:1 (2005): 1-70

Edward Said—Accidental Feminist: Orientalism and Middle East Women’s Studies*1 Sondra Hale SONDRA HALE, Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at UCLA, teaches postcolonial theories and gendered social movements in Middle East/Africa. Gender Politics in Sudan is one of her numerous publications within Middle East Women’s Studies. She has published on Edward Said in Al-Jadid.

I have been thinking of Edward Said a great deal during these days leading up to this symposium and have found myself talking to him. So I guess I will talk to him now: “Well, here we are, Edward, side by side—you, a Palestinian American, and I, an activist on behalf of Palestinians, together here in the belly of the beast, in a program co-sponsored by the Gustave von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, one of the Middle East Centers you singled out as ‘Orientalist’ in your critique. There is some irony here, but also perhaps some comfort we share in being ‘out of place.’”2 I have referred to Edward Said as an “accidental feminist.” I often refer to myself as a “recovering anthropologist.” These may or may not be related. My ideas in this presentation are based on the notion that we often do not have clear outcomes when we undertake a project. The ripples may become waves on the opposite shore. Could Edward Said have known at the time he wrote Orientalism that he would not only be revolutionizing the field of Middle East Studies and the disciplines at its core, but also a number of allied and aligned fields, one of which, Women’s Studies, had not fully come into being? This presentation is about genealogies of knowledge, in this case Middle East gender studies. It is about counter-hegemonic thought, in this case, the rupture of the genealogy of Orientalist representations of Middle Eastern and Muslim women. No one has ever actually referred to Edward Said, the central figure in our symposium, as a “feminist.” Not even in 1998, at MESA’s twentieth-year anniversary celebration of the publication of Said’s Orientalism, not even with Lila Abu-Lughod, a leading feminist theorist in Middle Eastern Studies on the stage

1

2005 Amerasia Journal

2

with Homi Bhabha to honor him. It is a well established but seldom acknowledged fact that Said did not deal with women directly in Orientalism. Yet Said, perhaps as much as any other major mid- to late twentieth-century thinker, with the publication of Orientalism spawned a plethora of works that took gender studies in the Middle East in a different direction from its origins and forever changed the field. We feminists read Orientalism by Braille. This process is not unusual for feminist scholars engaged in interventions—a process of feeling the context more than deconstructing the words. Feminist and gender studies scholars have had to read a number of major figures by Braille in order to find ourselves in the text and to give the text meaning to our field—for example, Karen Sacks (Brodkin) re-reading Engels and Marx; Gail Rubin reading the traffic in women into Freud, Marx, and Levi-Strauss; Anne McClintock reading racism, colonialism, and imperialism into Freud; Ann Stoler using Foucault’s approach to sexuality and power to generate imperial settings; and Middle East Women’s Studies scholars reading feminism into Gramsci, Foucault, and Said. By “Orientalism” Said meant many things: (1) “Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient”; (2) “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident’”; and (3) “Orientalism [as]. . .a Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” i.e., Orientalism as a discourse, as a “system of knowledge”, as “positional superiority.”3 Did women, as women, figure prominently in Orientalism? No, but women and sex figure heavily in Said’s critique of literary figures such as Flaubert. In fact, the first mention of women is in the context of Flaubert’s courtesan, Kuchuk Hanem and Flaubert’s strength in relation to hers. Flaubert speaks for her and represents her as “typically Oriental.” According to Said, Flaubert’s relationship to Kuchuk Hanem “fairly stands for the relative strength between East and West. . . .”4 Women do not stand for themselves. They “stand for” something else; they “stand in for,” and “stand as” fetishes. Said and others were eventually to be critiqued for this—treating women as stand-ins and not as people in and of themselves. Nonetheless, Said demonstrates that the Orientalist frame is filled with ideas about the oversexed Arab, where the Arab is at once over-stimulated and immobilized, acting out his sexual fantasies on the blank slate of

Sondra Hale

the woman’s body. In Orientalism, Arab gender relations is a portrait of the “over-fertile Arab and a passive doll.”5 Said’s was an intervention that indirectly caused a severe rupture in the conventional representation of the Arab or Muslim woman. His ideas called our attention to an image of Islam as lascivious and as having a repugnant sexual morality that was at the same time accompanied by a romantic eroticism. Others such as the anthropologist David Waines took the critique further and pointed out that early observers of the Middle East wrote that the tyrannical nature of “oriental” society was reflected in ruler over subject and “man’s wanton possession of woman as object”—the secluded, inaccessible, mysterious, erotic Muslim woman.6 Like the French postcard portraits reproduced by Malek Alloula in The Colonial Harem, women are everything and nothing at once. They are simultaneously veiled and bare-breasted, alluring and inaccessible. Said’s exposure of the lurid representation of Islam was important because the integral connection made between women and Islam has been problematic in the representation of both Islam and of Middle Eastern women. The eroticism and exoticism that characterized the representation of Arab/Muslim women was a hegemonic stranglehold not easily broken. Orientalism is about representation, about the “Other,” but most especially it is about the ways in which the Other is transfixed by the gaze, is reduced, exaggerated, exoticized, eroticized, romanticized, truncated, and always decontextualized. In a later work (Wedge) Said argues that any form of representation is violence.7 Feminists, taking off from Said and others (such as Gramsci and Foucault) and building on each other’s ideas, began to recognize and address the fact that not only were Middle Eastern women totalized, with no religious, regional, ethnic/national or class differences taken into account, but they were also treated as if they are encapsulated in defined and bounded groups or categories. Partially because of the ways in which scholars perceived the concept of “seclusion,” Muslim women were nearly always represented as confined—“to their kin, tribal, ethnic, class, or national boundaries; [portrayed] as isolated from men; and [seen] as passive actors in the public domain.”8 Studies also suffered from an over-reliance on various dichotomies: honor/ shame, patron/client, and public/private. Once these issues began to be addressed, the field exploded

3

Amerasia Journal

2005

into studies of women as actors, as political figures, as independent, autonomous beings, as workers, family managers, and the like. Islam, instead of being interpreted as the superstructural determinant of women’s behavior, began to be viewed as only one aspect of culture, as Lila Abu-Lughod has pointed out. Women were believers and non-believers. They had daily lives. They transgressed and capitulated simultaneously. They were a part of networks and grassroots politics. They were rebels and conformists—again, perhaps simultaneously. Yet, despite these changes in our scholarship, the legacy of Orientalism lingered. It remained a task to examine the reasons why women figured as central characters in the West’s dominance of the Middle East. Why were gender relations in the Middle East demonized? Why have we seen an “orientalist” design that posits women as the cultural icon or symbol of Middle Eastern society? Gender has been a point of exhibitionism. Dominant within Women’s Studies and research in the Global North is the underlying notion of Middle Eastern studies as being exceptional to feminist theories. Middle East exceptionalism has often been linked to the over-privileging of Islam, partially a result, as I just mentioned, of the strong link in the Western imaginary made between Islam and women. By the end of the 1980s, another rupture occurred in feminist thinking about the Middle East and in Middle Eastern thinking about Euroamerican women. Moving on from 1980s post-Said thinking about the West dominating the East through the denigration of the “Other’s” women, another dichotomy was shattered, or at least made more complicated. Following Laura Nader and others, we began to ask how images of women in other cultures could act as a control to women in one’s own society. In “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women,” Nader presented a methodology for examining the Western colonial frame as it subordinates its own women through a critique of the women of the “Other.” Using Gramsci and Said, she argued:

4

Critique of the other may be an instrument of control when the comparison asserts a positional superiority. The questions are twofold: 1) how does critique of the other operate as a key to the process by which civilizations and nation-states control their women and the women of other cultures; 2) how are the dynamics of male dogma controlled by notions that women’s place vis-à-vis men improves with the development of civilization, or the contrary view—that the higher the civilization,

Sondra Hale

the increased ascendancy of men. These two questions will combine to address the dynamics of male dogma operating in contemporary and interacting world systems: how could images of women in other cultures act as a control to women in one’s own society?9

As Said argued in Orientalism, all “this” is really about the West. And with that point he was to open the door to our realization that Euroamericans, through discourse, have contributed to the subordination of both Middle Eastern and Euroamerican women. I began by saying that this paper is really about genealogies of knowledge. I am proud to be an heir to the ideas of Edward Said, our “accidental feminist” and revolutionary thinker whose contributions to freeing Middle East gender studies from Orientalist hegemony will be forever appreciated. Notes *Paper for “After the Last Sky: The Humanism of Edward Said, ” Symposium, UCLA, November 21, 2003. 1. The term “Middle East” is itself problematic. Anthropologist Dale Eickelman’s concept of the “Middle East” relies on “. . .the presence throughout the area of key cultural symbols and their variants and. . .shared historical circumstances [that justify] that this region can. . .be considered as a single sociocultural area, ”The Middle East: An Anthropological Approach (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 4. While remaining critical of the term, he maintains that it is the best available and that one simply has to acknowledge its limitations and avoid glossing over the extensive differences, variations, and contradictions. Edward Said in Orientalism would have us recognize the Orientalist and Eurocentric aspect of the term (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 2. In reference to Edward Said’s memoir, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta Books, 1999). 3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 2-7. 4. Ibid., 6. 5. Ibid., 312. 6. David Waines, “Through a Veil Darkly: The Study of Women in Muslim Societies,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24:4 (1982), 643. 7. Said, “In the Shadow of the West,” interview by Jonathan Crary and Phil Mariani, Wedge (1985), 4. 8. Suad Joseph, “Working Class Women’s Networks in a Sectarian State: A Political Paradox,” American Ethnologist 10:1 (1983), 2. 9. Laura Nader, “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women,” Cultural Dynamics 11:3 (1989), 324.

5

Our Work Is of This World Moustafa Bayoumi

Amerasia Journal

2005

MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI, an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage, 2000).

6

No other outside practitioner has influenced Asian American Studies more than Edward Said. Orientalism, that founding text which powerfully explains how the production of knowledge and the application of colonial power are inextricably connected, changed many fields—literary studies, area studies, and anthropology, to name a few. It even inaugurated a new one, postcolonial studies, and it has also helped shape Asian American Studies of the last generation to an enormous degree. Asian Americanists have been using the theoretical perspective of Orientalism since its publication in order to launch critical attacks on the politics of representation and to expose the limits of American nationalism, the problems of white nativism, and the continuing ethnic and racial oppression of Asian Americans in the United States. And if Orientalism also explains how official power tends to deny, suppress, and distort other peoples’ histories through the effects of a dominant and dominating culture, scholars in Asian American Studies have in turn responded by producing works of historical excavation that challenge invidious stereotypes of Asian Americans and provide alternative and critical histories. A quick glance at the library of Asian American Studies reveals Said’s influence on the field. How many books and articles by Asian American scholars, after all, have “Orientalism” floating somewhere in their title? The irony, of course, is that the culture of the United States was never Edward Said’s major focus, and Asian American culture far less so. The Orient of Orientalism is the Near and not the Far East. Its protagonists are primarily European and not American. Its politics deliberately revolve around the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) and not much around Arab Americans, let alone Asian Americans. While Said’s intellectual contributions certainly extend far beyond Orientalism, the rest of his oeuvre similarly challenges the United States largely on the level of its foreign policy and barely on the level of its internal dynamics. Some, like Cornel West, believe this stance derives from a lack of understanding in Said’s work of what makes the United States tick, but I

Moustafa Bayoumi

think it is something else entirely. It is not a blind spot that kept Said from closely examining American culture (as opposed to its politics) but the realities of his exile from Palestine. To understand this, we need first to consider the figure of the exile. Years ago, Mary McCarthy defined the exile as “essentially a political figure. . .who waits for a change of government or the tyrant’s death.”1 This definition is too passive to describe Said and his prodigious energies (McCarthy later describes the “active exile” as the “revolutionist,” which is more befitting Said), but McCarthy is on to something when she explains that “if the exile stops waiting and adapts to the new circumstances, then he is not an exile any more. This condition of waiting means that the exile’s whole being is concentrated on the land he left behind, in memories and hopes.” The exile’s necessary condition, in other words, is to live a life of homelessness until the original injury, one’s dispossession from one’s native land, is healed by return or at least by its viability as an option. As long as there was no Palestine to call home, Edward Said had to choose a cosmopolitan, exilic identity over an American one, with all that that meant for the study of America. Regardless, Said’s critical perspectives on power, knowledge, and representation share something with the concerns that Asian American Studies has with social, racial, gender, and economic justice. Both are ultimately concerned with what Said calls “worldliness,” the idea that our work is of this world and participates in it and thus must be involved in the urgent political issues of our time. Intellectuals, in the Saidian sense, have a special responsibility to challenge structures of authority that naturalize domination. “The whole point of being [an intellectual],” explains Said, “is to be embarrassing, contrary, and even unpleasant.”2 How, then, do we assess the relationship of Asian American Studies to the work of Edward Said? Perhaps it is best understood not by looking solely at Orientalism and its influence on Asian American Studies, nor by examining how good an Asian Americanist Edward Said was (when he wasn’t one) but by examining another idea developed by Said that has more relevance for the future of Asian American Studies. In his 1982 essay “Traveling Theory,” Said asks what happens when ideas and theories “travel” from place to place and “from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another.”3 Since theories originally develop in specific locations in response to clear and definite historical and social circumstances, they may,

7

2005 Amerasia Journal

8

in their migration to other locations, lose some of their originally “insurgent” spirit, the power and rebelliousness that they first contained. In other words, with the passage from one location to another, theory runs the threat of becoming tamed, domesticated from an insurrectionary idea into just another analytical paradigm that is useful mostly for professional mobility or for policing a new orthodoxy. A dozen years later, Said revised this argument by proposing that ideas and theories can also be reinvigorated and made to speak to whole new political situations when they travel from one location to another.4 It all depends on the type of work being done. How well has Edward Said’s work “traveled” to Asian American Studies? Has Asian American Studies as a field domesticated and appropriated Said’s work into a slick professionalism, or has it breathed a new and novel life into his ideas by applying them to a different set of political and cultural circumstances? The question is an open one, but it is worth considering if only to understand the politics of knowledge in Asian American Studies today and to locate the heart of its enterprise. Here’s the rub: is Asian American Studies today still producing the difficult questions and oppositional work in the mode of Edward Said, required to challenge U.S. American society, or has it become just another academic field, more concerned with patrolling its own borders of belonging than with its original fight for human rights? To a degree, this is an issue of constituencies, both academic and ethnic, just as internal questions of belonging have always dogged Asian American Studies. Who qualifies as Asian American, how, and why? Originally formed on the West coast as an oppositional movement during the Vietnam War (mainly among Chinese and Japanese Americans), Asian American Studies has since grappled with how Korean Americans, Southeast Asian Americans, South Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders fit into its purview. (And one ought to note from this list just how central American wars are in creating domestic identity politics.) Now, with the United States lost in a brutal and mendacious war in the Middle East, a conflict that, perhaps more than any other, resembles the American conquest of the Philippines, West Asians (my brief comments here are limited to Arab Americans) are now uncomfortably added to the mix. Is membership in Asian America defined solely by an overseas geography, or by something else?

Moustafa Bayoumi

My argument here is that Arab Americans and Asian American Studies have much to learn from each other, and this has less to do with some abstract land mass long ago defined as “Asia” (which includes more than half of the Arab world) and more to do with American imperialism and domestic repression. To do this work responsibly, however, requires work and dialogue. The challenge facing Asian American Studies is to learn new histories (Arab and Arab American), particularly in their affinities with other Asian American histories, to consider the role of religion with more complexity (something Asian American Studies has traditionally shied away from), and to involve itself more directly in international struggles for justice, particularly those that the United States continually thwarts. The national/international divide that traditionally separates Ethnic Studies from Area Studies work can no longer hold, and Palestine and Iraq ought now to be seen as Asian American issues. With the mortifying and sobering reelection of George W. Bush, how can they not be? “One always dies too soon—or too late,” says a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, and Edward Said passed away too soon, at a time when we crucially need his voice and vision. Perhaps his most lasting contribution will be that political commitment and scholarly devotion enrich each other through the figure of the resistance intellectual. By examining the historically constituted nature of power, the resistance intellectual aims to understand the world and is committed to transform it into a more just social order. We may have lost Said, but we need not be lost without him. His example can live on, if we are committed to it. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Mary McCarthy, “A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigres,” New York Review of Books 18:4 (March 9, 1972). Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 12. Edward W. Said, “Traveling Theory,” The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 126. Edward W. Said, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 436-452.

9

Edward Said: The Founder of Postcolonial Discursivity Ali Behdad

Amerasia Journal

2005

ALI BEHDAD is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Dissolution (Duke University Press, 1994) and A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the U.S. (Duke University Press, 2005), as well as many articles on questions of postcolonialism, nationalism, immigration.

10

Paradoxical though it may seem, given Edward Said’s commitment to humanism, I wish to begin this essay with a text from which he actually distanced himself because of what he considered to be its blindness to the human dimension of discursive practices, namely Foucault’s “What is an Author?” “Unlike Foucault,” Said wrote in Orientalism, “I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation.”1 Though I am not sure if Foucault’s point about the “author” being a function of discourse amounts to the same thing as the erasure of individual authors’ imprints on a discursive formation as Said seemed to think, I find a distinction Foucault introduces in his essay between an individual author and a founder of discursivity useful nonetheless in tracing the “imprints” of Edward Said on the discursive formation of postcolonialism, a diverse field of critical inquiry broadly defined by a political commitment to undermining and dismantling coercive and dominating modes of knowledge. While critiquing the ways in which our culture individualizes an author by fashioning a singular relationship between a text and its author “who is outside and precedes it,” Foucault describes in his essay how the nineteenth century in Europe also produced what he calls the “founders” or “initiators of discursive practices,” figures like Marx and Freud, who not only produced their own work but managed to establish the endless possibility of such discourses as Marxism and psychoanalysis.2 Unlike other authors, these initiators of discursivity “not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but, as importantly, they made possible a certain number of differences” by clearing “a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of discourse they initiated.”3 Moreover, Foucault

Ali Behdad

suggests that, unlike the founding of a scientific endeavor, “the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to its ulterior transformations” because it “overshadows and is necessarily detached from its later developments and transformations.”4 And so, if there is a “return to the origin” in a discursive practice, it is always a return “to a primary and unadorned text with particular attention to those things registered in the interstices of the text, its gaps and absences.”5 The very act of initiating a discursive practice, Foucault remarks, “is inevitably subjected to its own distortions,” distortions that ironically produce the condition of possibility for new discursive practices.6 To trace Said’s role in initiating postcolonial discursivity, we may go back to the late 1970s when Said began to pave the way for critiques of imperialism and the body of knowledge that accompanied it—critiques that, I may add, were off limits back then even in the theoretically sophisticated circles of intellectual thinking in the U.S. and Europe. In a 1976 interview with Diacritics, two years before the publication of his Orientalism, Said remarked, “I find the New critics [i.e., poststructuralists and specifically Yale critics] to be quietistic; their concerns and closures are textual ones, the issues that engage them are—from a historical, social or general point of view—very restricted. They seem uninterested in political questions. The life of society, or the life of society that bears centrally upon texts and literature, does not occupy our attention. . . . I am as aware as anyone that ivory-tower concerns of technical criticism. . .are very far removed from the world of politics, power, domination, and struggle. But there are links between the two worlds which I for one am beginning to exploit in my own work.”7 Said then went on to describe his project that became the text of Orientalism, a book that played a central role in inaugurating the field of postcolonial studies. Indeed, as a political critique of European imperialism’s cultural economy, Said’s Orientalism has been a powerful point of departure for many postcolonial critics. I use the word “departure” here in its polysemy, as both a starting point and act of divergence, of beginning and moving away. Postcolonial critics often return to this originary text in order to depart from it by way of mapping new critical territories. Not only did Orientalism bring the issue of colonialism to the forefronts of the intellectual establishment by critiquing the ideological underpinnings of the scientific and artistic representations of “otherness” in European thought throughout modern

11

2005 Amerasia Journal

12

history, but it was also one of the seminal books that prompted a shift in the interest of literary and cultural theoreticians from textuality to historicity, from the aesthetic to the political, and from individual receptions to collective responses to literary texts. Moreover, because of its basic and constructive omissions, Said’s work enabled others, especially a younger generation of critics, to fill its gaps and absences by way of both broadening the implications of his critique and inserting the emerging discourse into new domains of generalizations. As an originary text, Orientalism provided the necessary means of inventing and transforming postcolonialism as a discursive practice to include new areas of critical inquiry. For example, while Said’s omission of female orientalists provided the condition of possibility for many feminist critiques of Orientalism such as those made by Lisa Lowe, Anne McClintock, and Inderpal Grewal, his focus on the Middle East as an imaginary geography of otherness allowed others, like Christopher Miller and Rey Chow, to broaden his theory of alterity and Orientalist epistemology by elaborating it in other contexts such as Africa and East Asia. What was remarkable about Said was that he not only recognized these other theoretical projects, he encouraged and promoted them as “projects undertaken out of similar impulses as those fueling the anti-Orientalist critique.”8 Indeed, only a few years after the publication of Orientalism, in “Orientalism Reconsidered” he tried to “draw them together into a common endeavour”—that is, the enterprise of postcolonial discursivity— by highlighting their similarities such as their decentered consciousness, their secular, marginal, and oppositional stance, and their political aim of working against dominating and coercive systems of knowledge.9 Here, Said viewed the enterprise of antiOrientalist criticism as part of a larger body of counter-knowledge, such as critiques of gender and patriarchy by feminists, cultural studies of subaltern groups by East and Southeast Asian critics, and the minority discourses produced by African American and Asian American scholars. What enabled the positioning of Said as the founder of postcolonial discursivity was not the originality of his critique. In fact, as he modestly acknowledged himself in “Orientalism Reconsidered,” what he said in Orientalism had been said before him by anti-colonial intellectuals such as Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, Abdullah Laroui and Anwar Abdel Malek. Rather, what made Said the founder of postcolonial discursivity was his abil-

Ali Behdad

ity to re-inscribe the works of these earlier anti-colonial intellectuals belatedly into an oppositional domain, introducing a new theoretical practice to politicize the academic debates about race and identity. As a philosophy of praxis, Said’s text revisited the works of anti-colonial intellectuals to produce a critical intellectual shift that was as political as it was practical in implementing a new set of practices marked by an oppositional consciousness, practices that renounced disciplinary denegation and disavowal that dissimulate the embedding of knowledge in relations of power. As he remarked in “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Said viewed the interventionary nature of postcolonial practices as a function of their interdisciplinarity and anti-totalizing approach. The counter-systematic and contestatory nature of these critical practices is what makes them defy the disciplinary and systematizing impulses that try to name, compartmentalize, and limit them. Said insightfully recognized that the problematics and politics of postcoloniality demanded a counter-disciplinary and anti-systematic mode of knowledge to rethink the relations and distinctions between ideology, history, culture, and theory. His oppositional work renounced disciplinary denegation while connecting the separate disciplinary boundaries in alternative ways through his critical intervention. Warning us against the dangers of fragmentation and specialization, he called for “greater crossing of boundaries, for greater interventionism is cross-disciplinary activity, a concentrated awareness of the situation— political, methodological, social, historical—in which intellectual work is carried out.”10 The counter-disciplinary position Said advocated may be viewed as a practice in negotiation and exchange, both in ways in which different modes of knowledge intersect and in ways in which postcolonial critics negotiate in the academy to mediate new oppositional possibilities. Said’s notion of postcolonial counter-disciplinarity, what he later labeled secular and contrapuntal criticism, depended on a certain historical consciousness that constitutes it as necessarily against the boundaries of disciplinary formation. Because, as a modern discourse of power, the science of imperialism produces a plurality of subject and ideological positions, any critique of such a science can be accomplished only through interdisciplinary praxis. In his introduction to Orientalism, for example, Said describes how his study has been written with several audiences in mind: for literary scholars to offer them a “marvelous instance of interrelations between society, history, and textuality”; for students

13

2005 Amerasia Journal

14

of the Middle East “to present their intellectual genealogy to them in a way that has not been done” and “to criticize. . .the often unquestioned assumption on which their work for the most part depends”; for “readers in the so-called Third-World” as a “step toward an understanding . . .of the strength of Western cultural discourse [that is] often mistaken as merely decorative or ‘superstructural.’”11 Since the discourse of Orientalism is itself a plural field in which historical, cultural, social, and textual concerns are linked, Said’s oppositional work aimed to unravel the complexities of cultural hegemony and the hidden relations of power that are always at work but always kept invisible in their working through strategies of differentiation, separation, and denial or denegation. Said’s work exposed the internal conditions of these strategies of differentiation through a decentered consciousness that rejects the systematic, totalizing authority of any discipline as such. In this manner, Said’s counter-disciplinarity was embedded in an oppositional consciousness that was on the side of memory. Said described his anti-orientalist project as a critique of the intellectual genealogy of mainstream studies of the Middle East, remembering through archival work what was historically forgotten and denied. As Homi Bhabha cogently remarked, “Said’s work focused the need to quicken the half-light of western history with the disturbing memory of its colonial texts that bear witness to the trauma that accompanies the triumphal art of Empire.”12 Said’s work is on the side of memory, its oppositionality a function of amnesia. In “Orientalism Reconsidered” Said remarked, “What for the most part got left out of Orientalism was precisely the history that resisted its ideological as well as political encroachments, and that repressed or resisted history has returned in the various critiques and attacks upon Orientalism.”13 What is remarkable about Said’s work is not the fact that it is the belated return of the repressed histories of resistance, but its originary place in setting in motion the broad enterprise of postcolonial discursivity that exposes the structure of colonial amnesia that denied the colonized his or her subjectivity and history while making use of that knowledge to critique the pseudo-historical consciousness that characterizes the neo-imperial discourses of otherness today. Finally, as a critic of the compartmentalizing and systematizing tendencies pervasive throughout the American academy, Said persistently implored ethnic, feminist, and postcolonial schol-

Ali Behdad

ars to challenge the institutional biases favoring exclusion, fragmentation, and specialization, while at the same time renouncing the exclusionary potential of identity politics. That Said did not espouse a unified or specific notion of postcolonialism and preferred to generalize his theoretical methodology as secular and contrapuntal was a clear indication that he recognized the “need for greater crossing of boundaries, for greater interventionism in cross-disciplinary activity” which would draw all counter-hegemonic scholars into a common endeavor. Citing an argument made by Myra Jehlen,14 in “Orientalism Reconsidered” Said warned against the common tendency to act as an “excluding insider” by virtue of either experience (e.g., being a woman or a person of color) or method (e.g., Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism). For him, the task of the critic was to engage in a sustained critique of the cultural, historical, and institutional conditions that perpetuate the problematic tendencies of identity politics in the United States and elsewhere. “Our point,” he argued, “cannot be simply and obdurately to reaffirm the paramount importance of formerly suppressed or silenced forms of knowledge and leave it at that, nor can it be to surround ourselves with the sanctimonious piety of historical and cultural victimhood as a way of making our intellectual presence felt.”15 All counter-hegemonic critiques, according to Said, are marked by a “decentered consciousness” that calls into question methodological consistency, disciplinary line-drawing, and exclusionary identity politics. In sum, Said’s work not only constitutes the foundation for a single mode of discursivity—i.e., postcolonialism—but also gestures toward the possibility of a collective and common body of counter-knowledge. Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 23. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Donald F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 115, 131. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 133-134. Ibid., 135. Ibid. Edward W. Said, “Beginnings,” interview in Diacritics 6:3 (Fall 1976). Reprinted in Gauri Viswanathan, ed., Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 13-14. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley, eds., Literature, Politics, and

15

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference, 1976-84 (London: Methuen, 1986), 226. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 229. Orientalism, 24. Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism” in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley, eds., Literature, Politics, and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference, 1976-84 (London: Methuen, 1986), 149. “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 216. Myra Jehlen, “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism,” Signs 6:4 (1981), 575-601. Edward W. Said, “Politics of Knowledge,” Raritan 11:1 (1991), 26.

My Mother the Hero: Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir as Feminist Text Anna Bernard

Amerasia Journal

2005

ANNA BERNARD is a Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include post/colonial studies and comparative literature. She is writing her thesis on discourses of national belonging in Palestinian and Israeli literature.

16

Professor Sondra Hale calls Edward Said an “accidental feminist,” an appropriate epithet for a scholar who often wrote about human dignity and justice but was virtually silent on the subject of gender. Although the presence of gender as an axis of critique in Orientalism indicates that Said was certainly aware of its possibilities, he does not deal with women as a group in Orientalism, as Hale rightly points out, or in any other critical work.1 However, in his memoir, Out of Place (1999), which recounts his life from his birth in 1935 to his graduate student days at Harvard, he confronts gender quite openly, reflecting particularly on the ways in which women and men respond to their assigned roles in a specifically Middle Eastern/West Asian context.2 The memoir provides enough material for a lengthy analysis of gender relations and women’s issues from the bifurcated perspective of the naïve young Edward as protagonist and the knowing adult Said as narrator. In this brief commentary I will restrict myself to the role of the most important woman in the book: his mother. Hilda Said, as her son portrays her, was a woman determined

Anna Bernard

in many ways by her geographical and social location. A Palestinian Protestant educated in a missionary school in Beirut, fluent in English, French, and classical and colloquial Arabic, she was subjected at the age of eighteen to an arranged marriage with a man twice her age and became a young mother of five based in Zamalek, a wealthy suburb of Cairo inhabited mostly by Europeans. Deferential to her husband in public but often negotiating with him on Edward’s behalf, by turns devoted to and devastatingly critical of her children, prudish about sex, naïve about politics, and given to sweeping proclamations on many subjects, Hilda would confirm most stereotypes of what a sheltered, well educated, bourgeois Arab woman should be, were it not for the force of her personality, which permeates Said’s narrative. As the memoir’s most significant character after Edward himself, Hilda provides an opportunity for the reader to witness Said tackling gender issues in his own way, autobiographically and extra-academically, as he probes his memories of his mother for insights into what drove her to act as she did. Said does not describe his mother as “confined” in the sense that Hale identifies as the Orientalist confirmation of stereotypes about the Muslim or Arab woman.3 Instead, like the postOrientalism feminist scholars Hale alludes to, he presents her as an agent who was both resistant to and complicit with her domestic constraints.4 Said relates that Hilda thought of her five years at boarding school, where she was a popular student and first in her class, as “the happiest part of her life.” After the “terrible blow” of her marriage, which Said says she “trained” him to see as something “difficult at first, to which she gradually adjusted,” she never worked outside the home or studied seriously again.5 Said infers that her “deep-seated and unresolved ambivalence towards the world,” which manifested itself in her role as mother as a temperamental and capricious attitude to her children, stemmed from her dissatisfaction with her lot.6 “It was only much later in my life,” he writes, “that I understood how unfulfilled and angry she must have felt about our life in Cairo.” His mother seems to have channeled her restlessness into managing every detail of her children’s perceptions of themselves and their relationships to others, most notably by convincing Edward and his sisters that they could only understand one another through her. He uses a telling metaphor to describe her strategy: “there were bilateral relationships with my mother, as colony to metropole, a constellation only she could see as a whole.”7 In her son’s ac-

17

2005 Amerasia Journal

18

count Hilda divides and rules her domestic sphere in a way not so very different from the masculinized method of colonial classification and control Said would later identify in Orientalism, even to the point of heightening the sexual tensions between his sisters and himself by making it clear that their bodies are “inexplicably taboo.”8 Conversely, she also assumes control over Edward and his sisters through a hyperinflation of the more conventional assumption that a woman’s life revolves around her children, making herself “our reference point, our most trusted friend, our most precious love—as paradoxically,” the adult Said interjects defensively, “I still believe she was.”9 In some respects this is a portrait of a damagingly controlling woman who in her unhappiness instilled her children with all kinds of insecurities, particularly an overriding sense of shame: “I am still not sure how many of the earnest, often plaintive feelings that I confided to her she actually guarded, how many she passed on to my father or sisters,” Said admits.10 Yet it can also be read as a sympathetic rendering of a frustrated woman whose impressive range of abilities was curtailed because she was a woman in a particular time and place. She is an intellectual reference point for Said as well as an emotional one: he lists “a profound interest in music and language as well as in the aesthetics of appearance, style, and form” and “a virtually unquenchable, incredibly various cultivation of loneliness as a form both of freedom and of affliction,” two of his most frequent subjects of investigation throughout his academic career, as preoccupations he inherited from her. It is a measure of Said’s conviction in his mother’s wasted intellectual talents that he gives her credit for having “imprinted” him with these fascinations.11 Said’s final tribute to his mother comes in the book’s very last paragraphs, when his experience of serious illness and her own merge through the trope of sleeplessness: “Now I have divined that my inability to sleep may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her struggle for sleep.”12 The boundaries between his being and hers are blurred, and the themes of her life are repeated in his; in a sense, he charges himself with carrying on her legacy. The fact that Out of Place presents a posthumous portrait of a woman who can no longer offer her own version of her life certainly raises the question of whether Said’s representation of Hilda can be taken first, as accurate, and second, as empowering of or for women. In his necessarily subjective interpretation of his mother’s behavior, Said may not speak for her as she would

Rey Chow

have spoken for herself. Hale notes that Said has been critiqued for depicting “women as stand-ins and not as people in and of themselves,” and it can be argued that Said’s narrative makes Hilda stand for the Palestinian nation, women in the aggregate, or even the fickle world of public opinion.13 However, his privileging of her feelings, words, and deeds over her gender, coupled with his recognition of the challenges she faced because she was a woman, surely constitutes an intentionally feminist and indeed humanist interpretation of her life. Said writes in the preface to Out of Place that he intends to record “an essentially lost or forgotten world.”14 The memoir leaves the reader with an equally strong impression of a woman who should be remembered for her stubborn negotiation with it. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Sondra Hale, “Edward Said—Accidental Feminist: Orientalism and Middle East Women’s Studies,” paper for “After the Last Sky: The Humanism of Edward Said,” Symposium, UCLA, November 21, 2003. Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta, 1999). Hale. Ibid. Out of Place, 14. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 60. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 230-233, 311; Out of Place, 61. Out of Place, 59. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 294, emphasis in original. Hale. Out of Place, xiii.

“Have You Eaten?”—Inspired by an Exhibit Rey Chow REY CHOW is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University and the author of numerous books and essays. Many of her publications have been anthologized, reprinted, and/or translated into major Asian and European languages.

An exhibit of close to 10,000 Chinese restaurant menus, printed

19

2005 Amerasia Journal

20

in the English language since the late 1800s, is currently running (until June 2005) in the New York Chinatown’s Museum of Chinese in the Americas.1 On perusing these printed menus, one is struck by an obvious tendency that accompanies the listing of contents—the tendency toward display, toward appealing to a prospective consumer who is not Chinese. As many who know something about Chinese cooking will attest, the décor, styles of cooking, and flavors offered in such Chinese restaurants are, more often than not, a blend of familiar exoticisms invented for the purpose of pleasing a non-Chinese clientele. If food can be taken seriously as a kind of cross-cultural exchange, Chinese restaurant food, like other kinds of “ethnic food” in North America, would be an interesting example of what Edward Said taught us as Orientalism. Insofar as the restaurateurs consistently engage in a type of representation—the putative “Chinese” way of cooking and eating—that tends to be aimed at gratifying certain Western tastes (that is, assumptions, expectations, and fantasies about the non-Western world), aren’t these restaurateurs blatantly guilty of fostering the misrepresentation of China and the Chinese people? Chop suey, egg foo yong, egg roll, sweet and sour pork, chow mein, fortune cookies, and so forth—all those items that signify “Chineseness” even while the ingredients and methods of preparation may be “inauthentic” or nonexistent in China—are not unlike the ideologically suspect literary, historical, and cultural texts that, as Said rightly cautioned, depict the non-Western world with implicit Western motives and desires. The one significant difference here is that it is Chinese people who are actively producing such Orientalism. Quite a bit more complex than the rationale behind Said’s powerful critique, then, a dimension of cross-cultural encounter unveils itself in this banal example of commodified eating— namely, native/ethnic people’s voluntary participation in the manufacture of Orientalist representations. Because it foregrounds the commercial relationship of production and consumption, and thus, by implication, a relationship anchored in a desire to be desired, food transaction in this instance points up the need to rethink Orientalism not simply as an externally imposed system of ideological mystification and manipulation, as is most commonly understood, but also as an elusive process of self-realization, a process that can be vital even when it is, as is often the case, demeaning. Clearly, in order to succeed at what they do, Chinese restaurateurs must be able to reproduce, day in and day

Rey Chow

out, this dynamic between ideological mystification and manipulation, on the one hand, and the internalization—the mastication, digestion, and incorporation—of such mystification and manipulation on the part of those who are being Orientalized, on the other. This is a dynamic with concrete material benefits. As a reporter puts it, “The journey of the Chinese restaurant remains the story of the American dream, as experienced by a constant but evolving stream of Chinese immigrants who realized the potential of 12-hour days, borrowed capital and a willingness to cook whatever Americans wanted.”2 Taking the metaphor of food one step further, what can we say about the fusion cuisines that seem to have taken the idea of food-as-cross-cultural-signification to such levels of novelty and sensationalism? The elite trendiness of fusion food suggests that that it is precisely inauthenticity—what looks and tastes like, what mimics, what suggests, or what is boldly modified from the “original”; and often what is accompanied by untraditional ingredients—that has emerged as the hallmark of a versatile global palate, progressively responsive to the possibilities of the New Age. In fusion food it is precisely the transgression, indeed violation, of set cultural boundaries that becomes celebrated as sources of sophisticated pleasure. In the form of previously unthinkable mixings and conflations of known items (mixings and conflations that have, in fact, characterized low-priced Americanized Chinese foods all along), cross-cultural encounters are now unabashedly about the playful deployment of cultural stereotypes (of ingredients)—dumplings filled with cheese, sashimi on toast, curried tofu on fettuccini, sliced roast pork on a Caesar salad, and countless other such surprises. The legacy left by Said in his magisterial work on Orientalism is therefore a continued challenge: how to engage, rather than simply dismiss, the contradictions embedded in everyday social practices, whereby people defy the rationale of enlightened academic critique even as such critique is intended to address the historical injustices they suffer? If Orientalism is most objectionable in situations of political and economic disparity where the violation and transgression of boundaries, otherwise generic to all cross-cultural encounters, become a matter of subordinating and humiliating the other, how do we come to terms with those whose daily existence and behavior are, historically speaking, thoroughly and irrevocably inscribed in such Orientalism? If Chinese restaurateurs act as though they are oblivious to

21

these concerns, might not their oblivion—at once naïve and cunning—be instructive? Even Orientalism, they seem to tell us, can be a form of livelihood; even Orientalism can become a novel ingredient, to be adapted and reproduced in fusion with other unexpected things. “Have you eaten?” they ask matter-of-factly; their practices, meanwhile, signify much more than a matter of filling the stomach. Notes 1. 2.

The theme of this exhibit is “Have You Eaten?” See Ming Pao Daily News (North American Edition), September 14, 2004. Michael Luo, “As All-American as Egg Foo Yong,” The New York Times, September 22, 2004.

Edward Said in Counterpoint Kandice Chuh

Amerasia Journal

2005

KANDICE CHUH is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, where she is affiliated with the American Studies Department and the Asian American Studies Program. She is the author of Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Duke University Press, 2003), and co-editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2001).

22

I didn’t know Edward Said personally, but I feel indebted to him intellectually. His work—especially, the insights and arguments offered in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism—has had a profound impact on my thinking. I remember my first encounters as a graduate student with those texts as incidents that directly shaped the course of my research and teaching. This intellectual relationship to Said’s work prompted me to accept the invitation to participate in this forum, which I understand in a broad sense to be an occasion to reflect on the influence of his scholarship on Asian American Studies. I think it would be difficult to trace definitively the impact of Said’s work on the ways in which Asian American Studies has in the past several decades engaged the relationships and legacies of a variety of colonialisms to the conditions and contexts of life for Asians both within and outside the United States. The historicization of the institutionalized and cultural discourses through which racialized differentiation has progressed that Said

Kandice Chuh

offers in Orientalism; his attention to the importance of the realm of metropolitan culture as the site which gives rise to the ideas that enable and necessitate imperialism as argued in Culture and Imperialism; his articulation of these arguments through “contrapuntal” reading practices that recognize hegemony as always denoting not only dominant ideologies but their resistant counters as well—these central concepts and arguments, described crudely and briefly here, have certainly found traction in Asian Americanist work. Today, we would do well to pay Said’s scholarship even greater attention, as the racialization of Arabs and Arab Americans and of Muslims across national boundaries continues to participate in the rationale for waging war in the Middle East and for limiting the freedoms of such racialized persons in the United States. Saidian insights can perhaps help us develop contemporary critical and political ideas based on an expansive notion of the objectives of and peoples referenced by Asian American Studies. But even as I would like to do honor to the significant impact of Said’s work, I would also like to underscore the importance of seeing that work not solely as the product of individual effort but instead as a signpost of changing material conditions that result from the efforts of many individuals, each engaged in a project much bigger than any one person. Thus, while the publication of Orientalism in 1978 may be identified as the crystallization of a discourse that has come to be known as postcolonial studies, the predecessors to that volume’s emergence by writers as diversely located as C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, as Said himself acknowledged, offered insights that helped to change historical conditions in ways that facilitated Said’s work. Similarly, the shifts established by anti-colonialist movements of the early to mid-twentieth century, and the antiracist movements of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, together with ways of thinking advanced by feminist and queer activisms—all of these are the underlying conditions that have enabled Asian American Studies to engage with Said’s work. Moreover, the movements in Asian American Studies which focus upon the histories, politics, and cultures of South Asian and Southeast Asian Americans have been crucial to opening the field to postcolonial thinking, including that advanced by Said. Such multiple historical forces and political movements that collectively underwrite Asian American Studies also form the grounds upon which Said’s ideas take root and flower.

23

This insight, of course, is not new: that material historical conditions create the exigencies as well as the possibilities for the production of knowledge is common to recognize. But I wanted to emphasize this idea because that insight can become so commonplace as to become naturalized as common sense—as something easily glossed over and not understood in its full form and manifestations. I do think that it is important to recognize individual effort, yet at the same time to remember the relations of power and institutional contexts and interdependencies that allow us to do what we do. To use Said’s own metaphor, if his scholarship has come into the foreground as the recognizable melody of various strains of Asian Americanist critique, it is the discursive, systemic, and historic contexts that underwrite and operate as the crucial counterpoint, allowing that melody to captivate us. The importance of counterpoint is, after all, one of the brilliant insights he emphasizes in his work, and it thus seems especially fitting as a way of remembering Edward Said.

Blood of a Slave, Heart of a King: Edward Said as B-Boy Sohail Daulatzai

Amerasia Journal

2005

SOHAIL DAULATZAI is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA. His current projects include Darker Than Blue, which explores cinema, jazz, literature, sports and hip-hop culture within the diasporic radical imagination, and Born To Use Mics (with Michael Eric Dyson) on Nas’ album Illmatic.

24

When hip-hop’s natural mystic Rakim Allah wrote “Know the ledge” in 1992 as an existential fable on hubris and human frailty, he also fired a warning shot to the arrogant and the powerful about the limits of both human understanding and even of knowledge itself. By invoking Five Percent Islamic metaphysics through his brilliant remixing of language and power, Rakim reminded us that even within knowledge, there is a limit to its possibilities—admonishing us that if we cross over the precipice, danger often looms. Like Rakim, KRS-One, Nas and other rap rebels, Edward Said’s critical opus has defiantly asserted a similar mantra about knowledge and power, history and identity. The poignant street scriptures of these MC’s that describe exiled Black existence in

Sohail Daulatzai

the diaspora are echoed by Said in his own meditations on Palestinian displacement and dispossession. In addition to his attempts to create both a personal and public narrative out of his experience and the trauma of Palestinian lives, he also fomented an intellectual insurgency against empire, indelibly tagging the walls of academia with an incessant and insistent critique of knowledge and the powerful role of history in shaping contemporary realities. This is why he is so relevant today in the post-9/11 world we inhabit—not only because of his rendering of the relationships between knowledge and power, canons and cannons, but also because the work he created had—to use one of his ideas— a “worldliness” to it. It mattered. For example, when it was revealed that the Pentagon was using Raphael Patai’s 1973 book The Arab Mind as the sacred text for its Inquisitions at the AbuGhraib prison and other United States detention centers, it not only confirmed Said’s contentions about the deep-seated Orientalist racism that continues to drive European and American control of the Muslim worlds, but it also revealed the intimate connections between the state, knowledge, and its service to brutal power. While Stanley Kurtz’s testimony to Congress regarding H.R. 3077 and the policing of Area Studies in the universities was ostensibly about “intellectual balance” and American interests in the post-9/11 environment, it was more clearly an assault on any honest and rigorous understanding of the role of history in shaping and understanding present global power dynamics. It should be no coincidence that Said’s work became the focus of this assault. Because for Said, history was and still is contested—a loaded gun held by the victors to the head of its victims, roulettestyle for those who question, blanks for those who conform, and one in the chamber for those who challenge. For those of us who question and challenge, how do we bear witness to the rogue power blocs, political-military cabals, and matrices of control being put in place across the globe? Put even more simply, how do we confront power? Not with what, but how? Again, Said’s work proves not only relevant, but also vital. Said embodied his own history and identity as a stateless Palestinian not only in the political positions he took, but also in his approach to criticism and speaking truth to power. The role and place of an exilic consciousness permeated much of his work, whether in his attempts to render a presence to exile or in his demand for an intellectual exile from traditional disciplinary

25

2005 Amerasia Journal

26

“homes” and “specialized” knowledges—what Said described as “secular criticism.” For Said, this kind of criticism would reject the orthodoxies and dogmas that oftentimes accompany various forms of identity—whether they be racial, religious, national, ideological, philosophical, etc.—arguing instead for a kind of principled nomadic existence that allowed for honest, just and reasoned critiques of history, power, and human experience. In the context of Asian American Studies—a “discipline” fraught with faultlines and profound possibilities—wouldn’t secular criticism free us from the constraints of disciplinary policing that have tended to fracture and contain the unfolding of a complex historical process that sits at the heart of what we are calling “Asian America”? Shouldn’t we also aspire to be an intellectual exile from the disciplinary home of Asian America so that, considering the history of Asians (Chinese, South Asians, and others) throughout the Caribbean, we can then make a space not only for U.S.-Cuba relations, but even more urgently, also for the gulag of Guantanamo Bay and Camp X-Ray as a relevant site toward understanding Asian American history and the broader trajectory of empire? And as the “War on Terror” has seen the vicious gaze of white supremacy turned upon not only South Asian Muslims but also Southeast Asians, Arabs, African Americans and Latinos—Muslim and otherwise—how will South Asian American Studies respond if it continues to reify and privilege a notion of “South Asian” as exclusively Indian, middle-class and Hindu? Wouldn’t we also be able to better engage the struggles of Iranians, Iraqis, Palestinians and the whole of edifice of control being brutally installed if we can create new narratives with the voices of Afghans, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Kashmiris, and others as well? Doesn’t this resonate with Said’s ideas about the intertwined histories and overlapping territories that have come to define the hypocrisy of Enlightenment modernity and the various resistances to it? By cross-fading and blending these multiple histories, Said’s work was artfully concerned with geography and maps—as both literal power fields in which imperialism unfolded, or even as metaphors for thinking through the process by which power, empire, and resistance operated. Though maps are official symbols of power and history, whose borders are still being drawn in blood, so much of the resistance and resilience of the human spirit resides in the actual territories represented by the maps— the fluid movement of the multitudes who constantly cross bor-

Rahul Gairola

ders, spilling over and forcing power to confront them and the possibilities that they inhabit. Similarly, disciplines, like maps, create boundaries—limiting and containing what is and is not possible within the borders of thought. But the territories of experience that these disciplines claim to represent are not so amenable to these demands of power—as intellectual migrants, theoretical exiles and vernacular wanderers challenge established orders, conventional dogmas and parochial visions of the connections between ideas and the peoples who embody them. Admittedly, the terrain now in the post-9/11 environment is rougher than ever before—a minefield even. But let’s not stand still or move with disciplinary blinders on because there is too much at stake both domestically and internationally. For example, can we afford to see H.R. 3077 as an attack on only Area Studies, and as a result see Ethnic Studies as somehow immune from the ideological impetus behind this bill? If so, doesn’t that reproduce and replicate the very troubling vision that empire happens out there, ignoring the work of Said, Amy Kaplan, Lisa Lowe, Anne McClintock and others who have forcefully shown that empire building as a process also happens domestically—that the racial Others abroad become the enemies within at home? Despite the post-Cold War claims of an “end of history,” it is clear that the frontier justice of the Bush junta sees the globe as an expanding American frontier with “savages” blocking the inevitable march toward “civilization.” Said dug into the crates of history to uncover the kinds of connections that would reveal the intimacies between American foreign aggressions and its violent domestic repressions. Let us bear witness to his legacy. Word.

Queering Orientalism: Sexual Otherness and Asian American Studies Rahul Gairola RAHUL GAIROLA is a doctoral candidate in the joint Ph.D. program in English and Critical Theory at the University of Washington. He has published in a number of edited collections and scholarly journals, including Jouvert, Comparative Literature, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.

Edward Said’s work has been effectively nurtured and/or appropriated by a variety of fields, including Asian American

27

2005 Amerasia Journal

28

Studies. But to say that Asian American Studies at the moment is counter-hegemonic risks placing it within a closed system, thus erecting the very boundaries of subjectivity that many Asian Americans have struggled to combat in their own histories. Given the widespread re-appropriations of Orientalism, however, those within the field of Asian American Studies must further critique how sexuality and race come together to construct, even contradict, one another in various ways. Thus the title of my query: questions of sexuality need to be injected into explorations of Orientalism. Sondra Hale’s essay names women as neglected objects of inquiry in Said’s magnum opus. I should like to extend Hale’s observation by taking the focus off the category of “women” by redirecting the politics of exclusion to one that names the very gender politics that construct “women.” Gender roles not only underscore Hale’s observations on feminism and Orientalism, but also create the space to map out sexual anxieties that arise from conventional social expectations of masculinity and femininity. Gender difference is what renders women less represented in Said’s work while it is the very point of differentiation that has historically allowed Western culture to brand orientalized men as, among other things, overly sexualized savages to be tamed or effete wimps warranting colonialism’s masculinist interventions. Gender anxieties in the form of threats to masculinity even run throughout Said’s own memoir, Out of Place. Nowhere in the memoir does Said feel as “out of place” than in his own body, which serves as the repository of gender anxieties catalyzed by the two identities he constantly struggles between: the self of Edward Said that he recognizes, and the “Edward” of his mother and father’s idealistic expectations. Said describes this anxiety in Chapter Four in which he evaluates his own body parts. These anxieties range from Edward’s lackluster chest, for which his father gets him a “chest expander” (64-65), his “pretty” face and “weak mouth” (66), his zealous need to engage in sports and work out at the gym (67), and, finally, one of the most prominent social markers of masculinity—“short hair” (73)1. Embedded at the heart of these extended criticisms of body parts and throughout the very spine of the memoir is not just societal and cultural expectations of masculinity and failure of those expectations in the visual field, as marked on the body, but also the baggage of sexual expectations in a straight, Western-centered world. Said’s memoir thus

Rahul Gairola

reflects the ways in which the body-as-text is over-determined racially and sexually. One can be constitutive of the other2. Moreover, such anxieties concerning gender expectations written on the body invoke anxieties concerning what it is that one can “know” about another through the revelation of gender identity, which, more often than not, is one’s sexual identity. Thus the bodily criticism offered by Said is not only a tablet on which is written multiple themes, including split identities through intersecting displacements, gender anxieties, combined Western and Arab expectations of masculinity, and father-son tensions, but also the fear of being perceived weak, cowardly, and effete. If we thus frame Hale’s observations in this manner, we can view Asian American Studies from a point of view in which transgressive sexuality (that is, the one gender not being properly sexually disciplined since it desires the “wrong” gender) can be seen as a latent concern of Orientalism that must be teased out further, especially in the vein of American Orientalisms and their global monopoly on cultural forms. Some of this important work has already begun in the context of tourism and sexual allure, and can be extended into the realm of Asian American Studies.3 I will end on a personal anecdote to demonstrate how notions on queerness, Asian American Studies, and Orientalism might position themselves in refusing to being labeled as “counterhegemonic.” I am South Asian American—born, in the heart of the Confederate South, of immigrant parents whose lives were turned upside down by the partition of British India. Their experiences of colonialism are part of a genealogy that led to my “Asian Americanness” by incident of being born in Richmond, Virginia, placing British colonialism and ethnic American identity within the same continuum of identity formation. This upbringing was ugly, as we were the “sand niggers” who lived but two blocks off Monument Avenue, a wide, tree-lined street celebrating pro-slavery Confederate “heroes” whose looming marble icons cast shadows of xenophobic racism and violent masculinity upon the sidewalks. My own growing pains were altered by two events: our move to the Washington, D.C., area and my concomitant discovery of Orientalism and queer studies as an undergraduate. The work of postcolonial theorists was the most influential aspect of my intellectual life then, and I devoured notions of the oriental and subaltern alongside my eager studies in queer sexuality and

29

2005 Amerasia Journal

30

gender. I was elated—the world finally seemed to be offering me categories for defining myself. Yet even this proved problematic. As a queer, South Asian American college student, it never occurred to me that one could be both since one of those identities could lessen the sting of otherness that the other category could potentially inflict. For instance, a part of me enjoyed being exoticized in the gay club scene of D.C., for it was that index of desire that made me attractive to the predominantly white males. Being fetishized by white gays as “Aladdin,” “almond-shapedeyed,” and “cabana boy” in some sense empowered me by inducting me into a racist community that nonetheless offered shelter from the constrictions of straight life. Conversely, I enjoyed passing for straight in the South Asian American communities that my parents frequented when the racism of D.C.’s gay community made it clear that people of color had no place in the racially narcissistic and bourgeois echelons of Dupont Circle. In both cases, I toggled between identity categories and communities to negotiate the yet shaky relations between Asian American and minority studies with queer identities. I mention this to push the point that Asian Americans and our allies must consider the cases in which members of our communities are forced to seek social refuge elsewhere under threat of homophobia, misogyny, class bias, and other prejudices that may not be reconciled fully when Asian American Studies becomes “counter-hegemonic” to racism. We should also note that some Orientalisms operate apart from privileging the racial index as the primary sign of difference—as Hale shows, gender is just as significant in constructing difference as is sexuality. Perhaps it is less risky to seek in Asian American Studies a mode of querying that is queer-conscious while building toward what Rachel Lee has termed a “gender-sensitive coalition.”4 This is not at all to undermine the vital work that Asian American Studies has already accomplished and in which it is currently engaged. Instead, I advocate supporting a model that keeps identities and polemics in motion. We must be committed to map out the terrains of racism, sexism, and homophobia within Asian American Studies itself and be wise enough to know that these discourses might circulate within the field itself once we label it “counter-hegemonic.” Notes 1.

Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 2000).

B. P. Giri

2.

3.

4.

An analysis of the over-determination of gayness as visually discernable on the body is deftly articulated by Lee Edelman in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1994); Robyn Weigman’s American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) attempts to do the same work in the arena of race studies; Siobhan Sommerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) explores how race and sexuality have been constitutive of one another in the U.S. for over a century; Russell Leong’s edited collection of varied accounts of queer ethnic experiences, Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay & Lesbian Experience (New York: Routledge, 1996); David Eng demonstrates the conflation of “Asian with anus” in his critical reading of Freud in Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Gayatri Gopinath’s work on queerness and the South Asian diaspora in “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion,” Positions 5.2 (1997) is especially instructive in reclaiming a queer South Asian agency through nostalgia; Roderick Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) rereads Marx alongside race and sexuality; and finally, Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler explore how conceptions of race and sexuality fluctuate with boundary shifts in Queer Diasporas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). These are but a handful of studies that can inform Asian American Studies and sexuality. Two very important works in this vein are M. Jacqui Alexander’s “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997) and Joseph A. Boone’s “Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism,” PMLA 110.1 (1995). Rachel Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.)

Edward Said and Asian American/ Postcolonial Diaspora Studies B. P. Giri B. P. GIRI teaches postcolonial literature and theory at Dartmouth College. He is currently working on a project titled “Postcolonial Diaspora and Its Antinomies.”

Edward Said’s work reminds us that beginnings are important not just to a field of inquiry such as Asian American Studies but also to the critical reception of his own expansive oeuvre, ranging from his study of Joseph Conrad in the late 1960s to many other publications, including Orientalism (1978). Professor Hale’s

31

2005 Amerasia Journal

32

paper takes Orientalism as its point of departure to reflect upon the emergence of post-Orientalist Middle Eastern Studies in the wake of Said’s work. While that particular line of inquiry has been fruitful, as seen in the list of works Professor Hale cites, we should, perhaps, look elsewhere in Said’s expansive oeuvre for a comparable genealogy of Postcolonial Diaspora Studies and Asian American Studies to the degree that the latter engages transnational, immigrationist, and diasporic concerns. One essay I have in mind is Said’s “Reflections on Exile.”1 The importance of this essay for Postcolonial and Asian American Diaspora Studies is twofold. First, it marks a shift in Said’s colonial discourse analysis from cultural nationalism/ critical third-worldism to a kind of cosmopolitan homelessness afraid of claiming loyalty to national homelands. Clear in this shift is the attention paid to a different site of non-Western subjectivity: from now on, the “native” as an object of the colonizer’s gaze will figure less powerfully as a bearer of anti-metropolitan resistance; instead, that space is increasingly occupied by the figure of the refugee, the nomad, the immigrant, and the exile— in other words, boundary transgressors of various sorts hovering in the periphery of metropolitan national societies. By acknowledging the modern age as that of “the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration” (174), Said’s essay anticipates the emergence of postcolonial and ethno-national diasporas as a force to be reckoned with in figuring cultural relations of power in the new century. At the same time, “Reflections on Exile” represents the condition of exile in antinomial terms, which is a major departure from his discussion of postcolonial matters in Culture and Imperialism and other works. According to Said, “[t]rue exile is a condition of terminal loss,” which, nonetheless, has been treated as “a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture”—its “achievements. . .are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever” (173). Such a nuanced description of the exile’s existential condition as something torn between gain and loss is only one example of its many contradictions. Other contradictions include the exile’s exulted status in literature, art, and theology brought low by history’s unspeakable racial pogroms, wars, and expulsions (175), and the supposed universality of exilic predicament fractured and given meaning by the forces that produce the condition of exile in the first place. Said’s critical method is variously described as “contrapunc-

B. P. Giri

tal” and “secular” because of the anti-doxological stand he frequently takes vis-à-vis the dominant orthodoxies of the Enlightenment age. However, the essay on exile represents exilic, postcolonial, and immigrant subjectivity (by implication, politics as well) in antinomial rather than oppositional terms, which has some clear advantages over colonial discourse analysis inaugurated in Orientalism. For instance, this approach refuses to work within the space created exclusively by the Manichean categories of the West and the non-West Said has found problematic because of the orientalist provenance of these categories. In addition, since his description of antinomies focuses on social contradictions as much as on political opposition, the antinomial approach can better explain the ideologically and culturally mixed up terrain of diasporic culture, politics, and sensibility. In postcolonial and Asian American exilic discourses, we frequently come across situations where the metropolitan native/settler and the third-world immigrant/exile are locked in a relation of otherness and opposition, a situation the machinery of Orientalism uncovered by Said can explain well. There is nothing in the immigrant formation per se, however, to rule out the exilic subject from becoming a shifting mirror of the imperial, the settled but unsettling, worldcolonizing subject, a possibility raised starkly by the work of V.S. Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhuri, Bharati Mukherjee, and Maxine Hong Kingston, among others. Antinomies of the sort Said suggested to be inherent in the condition of exile are also there in the constitution of the postcolony itself. Just which arm of the messy contradictions gets consolidated in these emergent, hybrid societies will determine how the term postcolonial itself is to be understood: as a late colonial episteme of European provenance that speaks difference to power, as some have suggested, or an episteme that re-articulates difference itself as a language of monological powers. Much has been said about Edward Said’s identity as a (post)colonial, displaced subject. One could also justifiably call attention to his Asian Americanness, since, technically speaking, Egypt and Palestine, the two places that claim him as their own, are Asian countries, just as his long residence in the United States before his death perhaps makes him, to adopt Sondra Hale’s vocabulary for a different purpose, an “accidental American.” Does this re-figuring of Said’s identity help us locate his work within the field of Asian American Studies? Ethnic kinship does sometimes matter, but not as much as it perhaps does to recognize an

33

identity of lived situations between the Oriental/colonized world he diagnosed as the West’s Other within the discourse of Orientalism, and the emergence of Asian America as an othered, shall one say, historically colonized, minority space. The protocols of Orientalism are undoubtedly very useful in exploring many facets of this minoritized formation, along with the task of exploring the status of the United States as a neo- or a non-colonial imperium, but I find it equally fascinating that we can also bring the insights provided by his essay on exile to bear on the discussion of the same formation. Note 1.

Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173-186.

Exilic Homes: The Legacy of Edward Said Ketu H. Katrak

Amerasia Journal

2005

KETU H. KATRAK, originally from Bombay, India, is Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies, and affiliated with the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Katrak specializes in Asian American, postcolonial, and diasporic literatures with a particular interest in the literary, dance, and other cultural productions of South Asian Americans in the diaspora.

34

Edward Said used his intellectual gifts, his abiding sense of social responsibility, and his personal courage in speaking “truth to power” as he put it, with eloquence and passion. He took political risks and faced death threats. A profound thinker, he recognized that culture and politics are linked integrally. As Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’s remarks: “culture is not prior to politics,” and cultural politics provides a powerful lens through which Said represented a rich and textured view of our world. Said’s notion of the intellectual as exile, as marginal and as an outsider had a personal valence different from his discussion of the “Other” in his path-breaking text, Orientalism, where Said unraveled power inequalities among civilizations. The speaking of these truths made Said an intellectual and an outsider. Indeed, as he notes in his memoir, even as a child, he had had “the over-

Ketu H. Katrak

riding sensation. . .of always being out of place”1 starting with his name, the pressure of language, Arabic or English, his despairing feeling of wanting to be all of one identity such as all-Arab or all-American. Later, as the adult theorist, he advocated thinking about identity as “contrapuntal and nomadic” in the Introduction to Culture and Imperialism.2 Said’s comments on the mediation of identity, the pain of exile, the negotiation of different languages, those of home, and those of new diasporic locations resonate to varying degrees for intellectuals (such as myself from India). In my once-home of Bombay, I am an NRI, a Non-Resident Indian, as categorized by the Indian State, with telling connotations, namely, whether resident or non-resident, the “Indianness” is unchanged and ensures the ties to home. Said’s work gives me the tools to question “Indianness” as a monolithic description and to recognize the multiple affiliations within that broad rubric. But bonds to a once-home do not erase the paradoxes of inside-outsiderness that resurface for me with acute clarity on periodic visits to Bombay. The experience of being part of a multitude of brown faces, and yet being apart, an outsider to the daily struggle for survival impinges on my mind and body. As I recover from the thirteen-hour jet-lag that makes my body feel flattened as a sheet of paper, and as I open my eyes to the country around me, the need to “speak truth to power,”3 as Said puts it, becomes ever more urgent. The gulf between the poor, the middle-class, and the wealthy is widening in places like overcrowded Bombay. Green spaces are rare for the majority—over 10,000 people sleep on pavements, and thousands more live in shantytowns. Different languages emerge from the depth of my childhood consciousness as I re-learn the physical codes of moving around the bazaar, speaking street Hindi or Marathi, or on the crowded local trains, or in the interactions with bank or postoffice clerks (on frequent tea breaks). Here, Said’s analyses of power inequities assume a lived reality. Recently, I took an interstate train from Bombay to Hyderabad, an overnight journey, travelling on the air-conditioned, two-tier sleeper, and I touched my own layered identity, “contrapuntal and nomadic.” As a returning NRI, I could afford this level of comfort, not available to the majority of Indians. And lying on this sleeper with its pale blue night-light under which reading is difficult, my imagination travels with the audible train rhythms. Questions about home, language, and belonging come into

35

2005 Amerasia Journal

36

sharp focus as I am on my way to a conference to deliver a paper in India on the adaptations of Indian dance by the diasporic Indian American community in Southern California. As the transnational connections become real, I seem to embody Said’s theoretical discussions of who produces and who consumes knowledge; how national, linguistic, and gender codes mark excolonized peoples in particular ways. Said conveys these complex concepts most concretely as only the most gifted theorists can. His words speak to me of the daily realities of living inside a certain skin, inside a certain geography, and inside frames of belonging or outsiderness. I want to pay homage to Said by tracing a somewhat unusual genealogy among three literary figures of our time—Said himself (growing up as he puts it) as an “Oriental” in two British colonies, Palestine and Egypt, and later in the U.S.), the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz who was forced into political exile for most of his life, and the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali who called himself “a triple exile.” Each of these creative workers, whether writing poems, essays, or scholarly treatises, illuminates the strength of the literary to breathe hope into hopelessness, especially for political exiles. All three individuals share a vision of speaking out against social injustice. Shahid Ali’s poem, “Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz” seems relevant as we elegize Said’s passing. Shahid Ali’s own recent premature death at age fifty-two uncannily echoes Said’s battle with leukemia for nearly ten years. Shahid Ali’s death leaves a gap in the tradition of South Asian American literature as Said’s does in the many academic fields that he inspired. As I was trying to put Said’s legacy in words, Shahid’s memory kept intervening—he was my friend and colleague at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a formidable poet, equally at ease with literary forms such as the ghazal, as with the sonnet and sestina. Faiz, like Said, like Shahid Ali, was a writer and thinker in whose hands aesthetics and politics unfolded seamlessly. Faiz suffered literal political exile from his native Pakistan as Said, and as Shahid Ali, experienced emotional exile from Palestine and from Kashmir, both war-ravaged. Faiz was well known for his mastery of the ghazal form, as Shahid Ali for his poems about his lost homeland of Kashmir. Also for Said, the pain of exile always remained. Faiz wrote in the best tradition of political poetry and redefined the usual trope of the beloved used in the poetic form of

Ketu H. Katrak

the ghazal into the Revolution as Beloved.4 I see echoes of this form of cultural politics and the commitment to work toward a more just and humane world in Said’s work. Shahid Ali’s poem, “Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz” opens with the epigraph where Faiz gives Shahid Ali permission to translate his poems from Urdu into English: “You are welcome to make your adaptations of my poems”: You wrote this from Beirut, two years before The Sabra-Shatila massacres. . . As always, you were witness to “rains of stones”. . . You had redefined the cruel Beloved, that figure who already Was Friend, woman, God? In your hands she was Revolution. . . When you permitted my hands to turn to stone, As must happen to a translator’s hands I thought of you writing Zindan-Nama on prison walls, on cigarette packages, on torn envelopes. Your lines were measured so carefully to become in our veins the blood of prisoners. In the free verse of of another language I imprisoned each line—but I touched my own exile. This hush, while your ghazals lay in my palms. . . Twenty days before your death you finally Wrote, this time from Lahore, that after the sack Of Beirut you had no address. . .But you still waited, Faiz, for that God, that Woman, That Friend, that Revolution, to come at last. And because you waited, I listen as you pass with some song, A memory of musk, the rebel face of hope.5

This poem by Agha Shahid Ali, as homage to Faiz, resonates with the kind of tribute that I would like to pay to Said who, like Faiz, retained that “rebel face of hope” in the midst of the most devastating onslaughts on his native land and his own sense of exile. And even though Faiz as political exile had a much more

37

difficult daily life than one can imagine Said to have had as a professor at Columbia University, nonetheless, the sense of a homeland far remained with Said. As he remarks poignantly in an essay: Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. . . . The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.6

Said’s intellectual voice embodies his personal pain, reflecting on loss both from his stance as an erudite scholar as well as his visceral connection with his homeland recounted evocatively in his memoir, Out of Place. A similar sense of loss about his war-torn homeland of Kashmir also haunted Shahid Ali’s many poems, including The Country without a Post-Office and the posthumous volume, Rooms are Never Finished.7 Edward Said was a model of the honest intellectual who faced his own history and the historical forces that shaped him. As such, he also provided a home for other intellectuals, writers, and poets like Agha Shahid Ali and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Said’s legacy, in the many fields that his work touched and transformed, remains monumental. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Amerasia Journal

2005

6.

38

7.

Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 2000). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). Edward Said, “Representations of the Intellectual,” in Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Random House, 1996). See my essay on Agha Shahid Ali’s use of the ghazal form in Catamaran: South Asian American Writing 1:1 (Fall 2003), 40-59. Agha Shahid Ali, The Half-Inch Himalayas (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 30-33. Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173-186. Shahid Ali, in the last few months before his death, was delighted to learn that his volume, Rooms Are Never Finished, had been nominated for the National Book Award. When friends like myself called him in those final months, he would convey this news with irrepressible joy in his voice.

Vinay Lal

The Intellectual as Exemplar: Identity, Oppositional Politics, and the Ambivalent Legacy of Edward Said Vinay Lal VINAY LAL teaches history at UCLA. His recent books include The Future of Knowledge & Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century, co-edited with Ashis Nandy (Viking, 2005), and The History of History: Politics & Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2003).

The late Edward Said was an intellectual hero. Whatever prerogatives can be claimed on behalf of heroes, Said would have insisted that heroes should be viewed whole, warts and all. Said had a relentlessly inquiring mind, and he remained certain that the work of the intellectual never ceases. Indeed, the intellectual is, or ought to be, the supreme oppositional figure, writing against the grain, thinking contrapuntally, disturbing the established verities, and comforting the (genuinely) afflicted. Yet, oddly, the near reverence with which he has been viewed, as the numerous obituaries and testimonies subsequent to his death so amply demonstrate, has precluded an engaged reading of Said’s own intellectual legacy. Let us speak first of Said’s heroism. Few American academics are public intellectuals; fewer still are those who will dare to adopt principled and controversial positions on politics. Said’s unflinching advocacy of the rights of Palestinians rightly won him the admiration of many around the world; it also gained him considerable opprobrium, the sole consequence of which was to embolden him further in his critique of Zionism as much as what, in time, he came to see as the self-aggrandizing and opportunistic policies of Yasser Arafat. Though Said was a relentless critic of American foreign policy, which he deplored as stupid and dangerous on more than one occasion, he viewed a petty nationalism everywhere as the bane of enlightened politics. When his Orientalism burst upon the scene in 1978, some in and outside the Arab world mistakenly began to view him as an advocate of Arab nationalism. But Said himself never mistook his own condemnation of the representational regimes which had rendered the Arab into a caricature for an endorsement of Arab leaders, and he was always forthright in his disdain for Arab states which had not only succumbed to authoritarian political tendencies but had resolutely prevented the creation of a

39

2005 Amerasia Journal

40

climate of feeling and thought which would make possible intellectual work and critical inquiry. In the last decade of his life, as he fought a valiant struggle against leukemia by plunging himself into an endless stream of essays, lectures, and political engagements, Said’s criticism of “failed” Arab states grew more trenchant. If the human rights abuses, political failures, and sheer lapse into intellectual obscurity of the Arab world were not enough, Said detected among far too many Arabs an alarming adherence to “out-moded and discredited ideas,” such as the notion that the holocaust was merely a fiction perpetrated by the Elders of Zion.1 The more arresting part of the narrative of Said’s resistance to intellectual and political orthodoxies is his staunch refusal to be drawn into identity politics. Nothing has energized American campuses more than identity politics and everything that has come in its wake, from the emergence of new sub-fields of study and the creation of Ethnic Studies centers to other forms of institutionalization of competing identities and an awareness of new forms of subjectivity; nothing is, at the same time, so predictable, so apolitical, and so colossally boring as the self-obsessiveness to which identity politics gave succor. That Arab readers would “use” Orientalism as a “means of conflict,” as a call to reassert their identity and not as an invitation to think analytically, was to be expected2; but Said could not have foreseen that Orientalism would become one of the principal texts of many aggrieved communities, all painfully aware of how little space they occupied in the dominant narratives of history. There had been talk of “dead white males” well before Said launched Orientalism, but the canon wars intensified as various minority histories, whether conceived in categories of gender, class, ethnicity, religious belief, sexual orientation, occupation, or even taste, were brought to the fore. Though Said had, in Orientalism, been concerned with the conquest of knowledge wrought by colonialism, and with the epistemological and ontological distinctions between “the Orient” and a generally implied “Occident” which were the grounding of Western scholarship on colonized societies, most particularly the Arab world, Orientalism came to be read as a general kind of treatise on the politics of representation and on the “evils” of Western scholarship. Orientalism was commonly interpreted as offering a number of views, nearly all of which, it is safe to aver, Said would have decisively rejected. Said certainly had

Vinay Lal

little tolerance for the idea that all Western texts are irretrievably contaminated, nor did he abide by the argument that texts exist in “pure” and “impure” forms; much less was he prepared to accept the argument that only Arabs are entitled to interpret their own intellectual traditions (and likewise with Africans, Indians, and so on), or that traditions can be hermetically sealed. While Said was obviously sympathetic to calls that were mounted on behalf of intellectual traditions representing the work of nonwestern, indigenous, and women writers, he strenuously resisted demands to drop “classics” from university syllabi, much as he saw no merit in sanctimoniously invoking “living non-European nonmales” as necessarily more inspired, wise, learned or sensitive persons.3 Indeed, one of Said’s most enduring legacies has been to show how works that reflect the prevailing consensus in a society constantly betray themselves, and he urged that these texts be read for their gaps, fissures, and dissonances. While he found justifications of imperialism abhorrent, Said rightly thought that only the narrowest conceptions of identity and nationalism informed the outlook of those who would entirely jettison Conrad and Kipling. One can conceivably point to Said’s lifelong and rather exclusive engagement with high culture as a weakness, if not dramatic failing, in someone who must surely have recognized that the prolific discussions of identity invariably evade notions of distributive justice. The United States, after all, is a country where the poor do not resent the super-rich, and indeed hope that they will one day step into their shoes—a country where the directors of the satire “Yes Bush Can” found signatures proposing tax cuts for the wealthy could easily be collected outside 99-cent stores.4 Said had the honesty to admit his aesthetic preference for canonical works of literature and music,5 but his comparative indifference to subaltern literatures and popular culture had some relation to the neglect of issues of class and justice in his work. His principled championing of the rights of Palestinians might suggest otherwise, but that enterprise points to other difficulties. Thus, if the state of Israel and Zionists are predisposed toward thinking of the Holocaust as the paradigmatic atrocity and evil of modern times, Said embraced the view, if not always explicitly, that Palestinians are the paradigmatic instantiation of victimhood at this juncture of history. Said did not give much thought to the consequences of abiding by this ironic reversal. His critique of identity politics, moreover, never

41

seriously engaged a vast and immensely complex literature, which ranges from folklore to analytic philosophy in the AngloAmerican tradition, on personal, political, and philosophical identity. For all these reasons, though he was a larger-than-life figure, his legacy may be much less enduring than the encomiums lavished upon him would lead us to believe. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Edward W. Said, “Israel-Palestine: a third way,” Le Monde Diplomatique (September 1998). See Gauri Viswanathan, ed., Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 438. Edward Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 374. See “The Bush Baiters,” The Guardian (November 2, 2004), http://www. guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1341274,00.html I have taken up this critique in “The Enigmas of Exile: Reflections on Edward Said,” Emergences 13:1-2 (2003), 105-115.

Before and After Orientalism Jinqi Ling

Amerasia Journal

2005

JINQI LING is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at UCLA. He is the author of Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (Oxford, 1998); he is currently working on a book project that deals with transnationality, class, interracial relations, and surrealism in Asian American literature.

42

Before Edward Said’s Orientalism made an impact on the general critical community, Asian American writers and artists were at pains to understand the nature of their social subjugation beyond empirical data, and to find ways of breaking out of the dominant culture’s crippling representation of them as America’s inferior other. The sense of crisis in Asian American self-representation found a poignant expression in Frank Chin, Jeffery Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong’s 1974 anthology Aiiieeeee!, in which they argued: The general function of any racial stereotype is to establish and preserve order between different elements of society, maintain the continuity and growth of western civilization, and enforce white supremacy with a minimum of effort, attention, and expense. . . . This subject minority is conditioned to recipro-

Jinqi Ling

cate by becoming the stereotype, live it, talk it, believe it, and measure group and individual worth in its terms. The stereotype operates most efficiently and economically when the vehicle of the stereotype, the medium of its perpetuation, and the subject of race to be controlled are all one.1

Although these observations in some ways anticipated Said’s theoretical descriptions of Orientalism, they tended to regard the forces responsible for the production and circulation of racial stereotypes as purely cultural and completely dominant. Such a view then led to the editors’ conclusion about “racist love” and “racial hate” as an immanent characteristic of cultural racism, a formulation that left little room for any ambiguous expression of desires on the part of Asian American writers and artists, whose dissenting voices must cohabit with the ruling racial ideology on a shared cultural terrain of inequality and difference. Said’s examination of the complicity of Western scholarship with imperialist conquests demystifies the ethnographic authority of Orientalism as a cultural discourse, while revealing its modus operandi as an ideological institution. More importantly, his emphasis on the civil domain of Western cultural hegemony—education, scholarly research, and mass media—as the primary medium through which Orientalism achieves its representational durability and material effects provides Asian American writers and artists with the necessary language and framework for strategizing alternative resistance. In particular, this approach allows Asian American writers and artists to go beyond the Manichean dynamic naturalized through Orientalist technologies, and to resist racial stereotypes without stepping out of the structure of their own constitution through critical and ironic self-reinscriptions. Equally significant is the distinction Said has made between “latent” and “manifest” Orientalism—a distinction that, despite its revelation of Said’s partial reliance on structuralism in theorizing the complexity of this concept, accounts for the mutability of stereotyping as but a symptom of the West’s fundamental interest in keeping the Orient reduced to “an unregenerative essence” through cultural representations.2 Said believes: “Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant.”3 From this perspective, the changing Asian stereotypes in American popular imagination (such as “Fu Manchu” versus

43

2005 Amerasia Journal

44

“Charlie Chan,” or “yellow peril” versus “model minority”) illustrate not just the self-serving nature of cultural racism, but also how Western cultural discourse operates as an instrument of social categorization and control, thus proving Orientalism to be an inherently political and insidious undertaking. As such, Asian Americans’ critique of Orientalist practice becomes significant not only on a personal, or ethnic-emotive, level, but also in a sociopolitical sense—that is, as an attempt to transform the larger socioeconomic structures that both sustain and are being sustained by Orientalism. Such critical endeavors would necessarily involve Asian American critics in direct or symbolic oppositions to the power of cultural formations or systems of domination. Here, Said’s rejection of the traditional humanistic notion of disinterested intellectual and his advocacy for intellectual “amateurism” and “extraterritoriality” becomes relevant. He believes that criticism must be “constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse,”4 while intellectuals should go beyond “the merely professional routine” to question the premises of American state policy concerning economic, military, and national security matters,5 hence daring to be controversial and interventionary. He further points out: “As citizens and intellectuals within the United States, we have a particular responsibility for what goes on between the United States and the rest of the world.”6 In keeping with such a belief, Said had never turned away from the fact that he was a Palestinian with American citizenship, or given up the conviction that it was morally wrong for him to “collaborate with the powers” that he considered to be “the chief authors” of his people’s woes.7 As a result of his politics, Said found himself marginalized within certain circles in American society. This, I believe, is an important context for Said’s mention of the “virtue of outsidehood” or for his speculations on the subjective potential of being in exile, a condition that he sees as pertaining more to “living with the many reminders of unsettlement” than to untrammeled nomadic play across time and space.8 According to Said, such a state of existence requires that the intellectual make a conscious effort to affiliate herself/himself with the public sphere, to question all orthodoxy, and to upset all established routine. It is from such a perspective that Said problematizes intellectuals who fail to consider American imperial intervention as a factor in their theoretical discussion of global issues,9 and who adapt to the

Jinqi Ling

exigencies of the rhetoric of the left, but surrender its true radical prerogatives without real opposition.10 I find these reflections by Said pertinent to Asian American scholars, especially to those who see themselves as similarly engaged in intellectual representations. As one such intellectual, I am often confronted with political questions, some of which seem difficult to avoid or resolve. For example, I feel a constant tension between my American citizenry and my own identity as an immigrant from China, a country that rarely connotes positively in a culture that prides itself on being the winner of the cold war. What does this discrepancy mean to me as a cultural critic in a field that is closely associated with East Asia—where the United States has been a dominant outside force since WWII— yet reluctant to examine the histories and conflicts in the region beyond the existing ideological framework? I also feel frustrated, in line with Fredric Jameson’s well known complaint, about the dismissive treatments that the Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) often receives in American cultural criticism.11 To many readers in the third world, including the narrator of Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart,12 Lu Xun is a champion of the oppressed and a fearless fighter against the dehumanizing effects of China’s “semi-feudal and semi-colonial” condition, a characterization of the post-Opium War Chinese society given by Mao Zedong.13 As a consequence, I see a certain connection between Lu Xun’s project and that endorsed by Frantz Fanon, who criticizes the same social ills he finds rampant in both the Frenchoccupied and the neocolonial Algeria. That is, the animalization of the native and Western co-optation of the country’s “intermediary sector,” a term that Fanon uses in reference to the Algerian neocolonial elites.14 Is the fate of Lu Xun in American academic criticism, as Jameson suggests, mainly a result of the West’s psychologized reductions of the anti-feudal and anti-imperial significance of his work to the realm of private obsession?15 Or is it also because the study of Lu Xun is being placed in a zone of the Western problematization of China within the juridical authorities of American public discourse? How do these concerns translate themselves into ambiguities of my own representation, or, at times, even my silence? Here, a bit of Saidian skepticism or irony might help recognize, for example, the fact that the territorial division between mainland China and Taiwan, like that between North and South Korea, is largely a result of the postwar American military intervention,

45

2005 Amerasia Journal

46

and that the maintenance of such a division reflects, in the end, tremendous U.S. national investment. Can we afford to leave unhistoricized the political and material consequences of such an obvious case of what Said might call “triumphant [American] nationalism,”16 as we engage in theoretical re-descriptions of the past and future for the Asian Pacific Rim, including China, within the comfort of academic discourse? When we choose to be silent about such external U.S. interventions, are we ready to accept their translation into domestic inequalities and the repeated production of racial enemies from within, as evidenced in the accusation made by the U.S. government against Dr. WenHo Lee of conducting espionage for mainland China? Dr. Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Taiwanese origin, had neither interest in Asian American social activism, nor sympathy for China as an authoritarian socialist state. Yet, due to his ethnic background, he was conveniently linked, through official manipulations of self-induced paranoia, to a perceived Chinese threat to U.S. national security interest. This suggestive replay of the scenarios and implications of the wartime internment of Japanese Americans—the master trope of Asian Americans’ social displacement in their own country—is disturbing enough to remind us of the inevitable link between the social inequalities we face here and the activities America is engaged in elsewhere. Almost the entire post-1970s generation of American humanistic scholars came to a theoretical awareness of the interrelated issues of Eurocentrism, Western epistemology, empire, and racism through the work of Edward Said. During this period, much cultural criticism that has been done in Asian American Studies is marked by such fecund Saidian notions as “worldliness,” “affiliation,” “oppositional knowledge,” and “secular criticism.” Despite his contribution of a unique cultural theory and his inauguration of the field of postcolonial studies, however, Said’s work is not beyond reproach. For example, the ideological contradictions in the body of his writings—contradictions that largely result from his eclectic combination of insights from Auerbach, Foucault, Guha, Luckas, and Gramsci, among others, and his difficult negotiation between his investment in adversarial politics and his conscious rejection of programmatic Marxism—have been a topic of considerable dispute among theorists and activists. Nevertheless, Said is consistent in his self-critical analysis and in his acknowledgement of theory’s limitations. He believes that a “breakthrough can become a trap, if it is used uncritically,

Jinqi Ling

repetitiously, limitlessly.”17 Said’s admonitions about theory’s troubled transmission and its tendency to freeze into epistemological dogma deserve attention from those interested in practicing his brand of theory. It invites them to think about not only theory’s real functions, but also the need for theorists to resist tendencies toward scholasticism and relativism in academic milieus surrounded by conservative forces. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

Frank Chin, et al., “Fifty Years of Our Whole Voice,” in Frank Chin et al., eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974), xxvi-xxvii. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 268. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 206. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 29. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 82-83. Edward W. Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989), 215. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 108. Ibid., 48. Said, “Representing the Colonized,” 214. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 160. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1996), 69-70. Bulosan praises Lu Xun’s stories as an embodiment of “dignity and humanity”; note that Lu Xun’s name is spelled as “Lu-sin” in this work. See Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1943/1996), 246. Mao Zedong, “On New Democracy,” in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1940/1965), 340-342. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 42, 180. Jameson, 71-72. Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Russell Ferguson et al., ed., Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 359. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 239.

47

On Edward Said Lisa Lowe

Amerasia Journal

2005

LISA LOWE is professor of Comparative Literature at UC San Diego, and affiliated with the Department of Ethnic Studies and Program in Critical Gender Studies. She has published books on Orientalism, immigration, and globalization, including Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996).

48

We lost Edward Said in September 2003. It was an even greater sorrow that he died just after the United States invaded Iraq in a fever of anti-Islamic Orientalism against which he had worked for decades. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, then part of British-ruled Palestine, and lived most of his adult life in the U.S. He devoted himself tirelessly, as a scholar, teacher, and public intellectual, to analyzing the means through which modern European colonialism had secured its powerful claim to civilization through constructing the Arab and Middle Eastern worlds as backward, primitive and in need of western development. His 1979 book, Orientalism, argued that the European study of Oriental languages and cultures constituted a discourse that both managed and produced the nonwestern civilizations in North Africa and the Middle East as antithetical to modern Europe. Said’s Orientalism inaugurated a criticism of Eurocentrism that transformed the humanities and social sciences throughout the 1980s, particularly the fields of history, anthropology, and literature, but also sociology, religion, philosophy, art, and theatre; the critique unsettled the authority of European narratives that developed societies and civilizations from pre-history to modernity and that privileged the western nation-state as the universal model to be attained, against which all other societies would be measured and compared. Some scholars have later suggested that Said may have overstated the monolithic historical scope of Orientalism, that medieval and early modern Orientalisms represented Jews, Muslims, Hindus and pagans as others of Christendom before the emergence of “Europe,” and that the Orientalism he described was a modern colonial governmentality. Others suggested that Orientalism was gendered and engendering, that it was neither monolithic nor the discrete possession of western nations but had been performatively parodied and displaced both in and outside the West. Yet what accompanied Said’s watershed deconstruction of Eurocentric Orientalism were not only critical

Lisa Lowe

studies of European colonialism in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, but the recognition of the cultural critiques emerging from postcolonial locations. Said himself published several works, The Question of Palestine (1979) and After the Last Sky (1986), on the occupation of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He took courageous stands and made eloquent public statements about the need for peace in the Middle East and justice for Palestinian people. Even if he may not have intended it, Said’s work enriched Asian American Studies enormously. From Orientalism onward, it inspired many of us to observe not only that the U.S. nation had been built upon constructions of Asian foreigners as alien and antithetical to American political and cultural modernity, both as immigrant laborers and as enemies at war, but also that discourses of knowledge and power consolidate U.S. state authority precisely by racializing, dividing, and regulating the variety of objects they discipline: Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, South Asian, Korean, Vietnamese, Arab, Muslim, alien, criminal, terrorist. . . . The U.S. Orientalism deployed to justify the use of brutal military force in the colonization of the Philippines, the war against Japan (1941-1945) culminating in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war in and partition of Korea (1950-1953), and the war in Vietnam (1954-1975) has shifted, since September 11, 2001, to construct a foreign Muslim enemy—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, in Central Asia and South Asia, and among the immigrant citizenry of the U.S. U.S. immigration laws and laws of naturalization and citizenship have been not only means of policing the terms of citizenship within the nation-state, but part of an Orientalist discourse that has defined Asians as enemies in times when the U.S. has constructed itself as ideologically at war with Asia. The bolstering of national identity throughout the twentieth century while the U.S. was at war in Asia, coupled with the imperatives of racializing an Asian immigrant workforce from a variety of national origins, necessitated a complex and variegated discourse for managing “oriental otherness.” A racialized and gendered anti-Asian discourse produced and managed a “double-front” of Asian threat and encroachment: on the one hand, as external rivals in overseas imperial war and global economy, and on the other, as a needed labor force for the domestic economy. The “blood-will-tell” anti-Japanese racial discourse during WWII, propaganda about the traitorous Asian as less than human, the

49

2005 Amerasia Journal

50

figured conflation of Asian women with accessible foreign territories to be conquered and subdued, are all parts of a mid-century U.S. Orientalism tailored to homogenize and subordinate both internal and external Asian populations. World War II inaugurated an acute figuration of the Asian as racial enemy; and throughout the postwar period until 1970, war films, popular novels, as well as “official” historical narratives deployed this Cold War Orientalism to unify and fortify U.S. national identity against the rival Soviet Union in relation to territories and markets throughout Asia. In the post-Cold War period, though the traditional antiAsian figurations persist, the emergence of newly industrialized countries in Asia also gave rise to a discourse of economic penetration and trade with those overseas nations that the U.S. had previously caricatured as enemies. In the meantime the abolition of national origin quotas since 1965 has enormously changed the profile of “Asian Americans,” rendering the majority of the constituency Asian-born, rather than multiple-generation; and new immigrants from South Vietnam, South Korea, Cambodia, Laos, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have diversified what constitutes “Asian American,” which no longer refers exclusively to immigrants of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino descent. By the late 1970s, neither the Fordist division of labor in mass production nor Keynesian state managerialism that had consolidated national industries before and after WWII could contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism, as the power of industrial labor unions grew, and the search for cheaper labor and greater markets found Asia and Latin America. As production shifted globally in the 1980s, making use of Asian and Latin American female labor in low-cost export assembly and manufacturing zones, the proletarianization of nonwhite women led to a breakdown and a reformulation of the categories and the relations of national, racial, and gender difference that were characteristic of the earlier, more nationalist-inspired, Orientalism before the Cold War. Transnational capitalism effected not only a “denationalization” of corporate power, but also composed a new workforce that expresses itself in the reorganization of oppositional movements and constituencies against capital that articulate themselves in terms and relations other than the “national,” such as transnational feminist work by U.S. women of color and racialized women from the formerly colonized world.

Thu-huong Nguyen-vo

Globalization and the “new world order” represents a major change in not only the territorial organization of economic and political sovereignty, but also in the means, agents, and strategies that are necessary to contest that “new world order.” In this new era, women, new immigrants, political prisoners, refugees, and other non-state subjects who do not possess citizenship are among the important social actors who are transforming how we conceive of social justice and social change. The political projects in Asian American Studies must be as broad and capacious as the networks of power we desire to challenge. The most profound legacy of Edward Said for scholars, students, and activists in Asian American Studies may not be the most obvious one. It is not exclusively Said’s analysis of Orientalism that affects our field, but the scale and worldliness of his political thinking that ranged from the roles of women during the French Algerian War, to the suffering of those displaced and stateless in Gaza, to the plight of secular humanism in an era of pre-emptive war. Perhaps the legacy of Edward Said’s decency and courage as a public intellectual is that his worldliness has challenged us, in Asian American Studies and in any field associated with a national identity, not to confine our understanding of justice to an exclusive concept, ideology or critique, not to restrict the pursuit of it to the cause of a single people or border.

Orientalism: Entrances and Exits Thu-huong Nguyen-vo THU-HUONG NGUYEN-VO currently teaches issues of globalization and Vietnamese Studies at UCLA. She is working on a manuscript tentatively entitled The Real and the True: Commercial Sex, Cultural Representations, and the Governance of Neo-liberal Freedoms in Vietnam.

Following Sondra Hale’s spirit of appreciating while evaluating Edward Said’s legacy, I am addressing here what his critical concept of Orientalism enables, the contradiction it raises for Asian American critical studies, and finally his return to humanism for their resolution. Let me begin by way of a more personal memory. In the years we first came here as refugees after the end of the Vietnam War, we lived as if in an afterlife. We needed acknowl-

51

2005 Amerasia Journal

52

edgements that we had indeed lived in a particular place. Such acknowledged history would connect us to our continued existence here and now. We were looking for signs of mutual recognition between “us refugees” and “Americans” in an intersecting history. We eagerly told each other of any mentioning of Vietnam on the news, a TV show, or a movie. So of course my whole family and some friends eagerly went to see Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter in 1978. At the time, I was growing into a teenage girl and was religiously learning names of American movie stars: Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep. But I also learned American boys and men sank into the vast fatefulness of death that was Vietnam as if it wasn’t a place with people in it but some pit of psychic quicksand where Christopher Walken and his friends tied red bandanas around their heads and pulled the trigger at their temples in games of Russian Roulette. I remember the grownups afterward trying to reassure the kids and themselves that they had never heard of, let alone seen, Russian Roulette as a form of gambling in Vietnam. We couldn’t recognize the place because we mistook Americans’ Vietnam for our Vietnam. Humans who acted on their world did not live in America’s Vietnam, and so we could not find ourselves there. We tried again with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The shock of entering that house of mirrors, where our reflections came back broken and unrecognizable, was complete. If Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s adaptation were anti-imperialist endeavors, I didn’t notice. If the film exposes the ugly delusions and destruction by American Imperialism over Vietnam or Vietnamese, then why did it feel so devastating to see it as a Vietnamese? I had seen the violence of bombs and artillery, but sitting in that theater, I experienced the violence of being represented, rendered into image: Kurt’s chalked-out natives in a vast muddy cult of death. All those people I knew and loved up to then were someone else’s private metaphor. No entry for us. Lawrence of Arabia once pondered dreamers of the night who wake into day, and called men like himself dreamers-of-the-day who cannot wake because the dream allows for no more day, no more outside. American visions of Vietnam, imperialist delusions or anti-imperialist hallucinations, remain a function of imperialist ideology, like some Lawrencian dream. I couldn’t fully articulate my encounter in the theater until I read Said’s Orientalism and later Culture and Imperialism. The concept makes clear that Africa, Arabia, Vietnam are interchangeable places of glory or morass in

Thu-huong Nguyen-vo

the imperialist dreamscape. It is a debt that I owe Said. But what of Said’s critical concept to provide interpretive or analytic unity? Does it signal an outside populated with actual people with whom one can engage? The concept’s focus on the West, if not deployed with care, can easily de-center the people represented by the West. As Shumei Shih warns, an excessive return to the West’s doings and imaginings can become “narcissistic” in that it replaces the need for difficult engagement with actual people and their histories. It has become too easy to charge a film or a piece of writing with Orientalism, to the point where “orientals” are accused of selforientalizing, as Rey Chow observes in others’ critiques of Zhang Yimou’s films. It’s when we get to the “orientals’ Orientalism” that we ourselves have entered into the imperial daydream with no exit. It’s here that we deny ourselves our existence irreducible to imperialist ideology, thus foreclosing any possibility for our coming into humans who can act on their world. Said clearly recognized this danger and tried to address it in Culture and Imperialism: “Life in one subordinate realm is imprinted by the fictions and follies of the dominant realm. But the reverse is true, too, as experience in the dominant society comes to depend uncritically on natives and their territories perceived as in need of la mission civilisatrice.”1 Symptomatic of the contradiction in the deployment of critiques of Orientalism, Said’s “reverse” isn’t really a reverse. It merely refocuses our attention back on the West subjected to its own subjugating imagining about those it dominates. There are hardly “two sides” in that formulation. Said’s arrival at “the other side” took difficult strategies of entrances and exits in and out of his own critical concept. For those of us Asian Americans engaged in critical studies, what possibilities exist to preserve a line of exit from Said’s critical concept when necessary? Viable strategies have been proposed. Shu-mei Shih calls for real engagement with subjects of histories both connected to and distinct from the West’s. Henry Yu uses history to demonstrate the need for institutional democratic knowledge production. Rey Chow shows us how “orientals” can and do throw back at the West its craving for orientalist spectacles. Lisa Lowe proposes looking at the “noncorrespondence” between orientalized objects and Asian American subjects. There are others. None has proposed fundamentalism as a way out. In his last book Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said

53

himself re-arrives at Western humanism as the West’s best hope for seeing beyond its imperial daydream. In the end, Said dismisses an interpretive unity provided either by Western orientalism or his own critical concept of it. Instead, he holds up the model of Auerbach exiled by war in Istanbul from the weight of books, painstakingly deciphering the texts at hand, engaging with them as only the best reader can in her/his genuine hospitality toward those different by virtue of history. Said lived, and inhabits still, two worlds: that of the colonizer and the colonized. Tension remains in his “return” to Western humanism, as tension remains in all of us who shuffle uneasily between image and lived history, between Asian and American, between classes, races, places, nationalities, and gender positions. As tension should, for all of us, as we head toward democratic inclusion. That is the legacy of Edward W. Said. Note 1.

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), xix.

The Man Who Confounded Congress* Vijay Prashad

Amerasia Journal

2005

VIJAY PRASHAD has just finished writing Darker Nations: the Rise and Fall of the Third World (New Press, 2005). He is the author of Karma of Brown Folk, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, among others, and teaches at Trinity College, Connecticut.

54

On June 19, 2003, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Select Education met for a hearing on “International Education and Questions of Bias.” The list of those who testified before the Subcommittee was short, and among them one was Stanley Kurtz. A fellow at the Hoover Institution and a writer for National Review, Kurtz had done his Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard. His book, All the Mothers are One: Hindu India and the Cultural Reshaping of Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 1992), claims to reconfigure the main concepts of psychoanalysis with an eye to the cultural realities of India. However, as Religious Studies scholar Cynthia Ann Humes put it in a very thorough review, Kurtz raises several questions, but he fails to do what he sets out to do. She shows how Kurtz offers generalities from very slim evi-

Vijay Prashad

dence, that while he purports to write of gender and religion, he basically focuses on the “Hindu boy.” But Humes most devastating conclusion is this, “Hinduism” itself is largely an artifice; South Asia boasts numerous cultures. Kurtz criticizes [anthropologists] Gananath Obeysekerere and Melford Spiro for perpetuating the “Western bias” of individualism and the universality of psychoanalytical structures, yet he himself uses material on individuals from joint (even non-joint) families throughout South Asia without paying any heed to differences in region, language or religion (he assumes Indian Muslims have the same psychology as Hindus), a method that in the end borders on racism: despite arguing for greater sensitivity to cultural difference in psychology, “those people” over “there” are actually all alike—but not like “us.”1

Ouch. With this resume, Kurtz sat before Congress to declare, “I am not arguing that authors like Edward Said ought to be banned from Title VI funded courses. My concern is that Title VI funded centers too seldom balance readings from Edward Said and his like-minded colleagues with readings from authors who support American foreign policy.” Why would Kurtz even consider the censorship of Said, or why would Kurtz feel that Congress should see in Said such a threat that it must ensure a balance to his outrageousness? Kurtz lays out his case in this way: Said is the founder of “post colonial theory”; “postcolonial theory” is the “ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area studies”; Said links “professors who support American foreign policy with the 19th century European style intellectuals who propped up racist colonial empires”; Said and “postcolonial theory” are to blame for the lack of U.S. intellectuals who give themselves to the state as adjuncts in the war on terror. Ergo: Said and his legacy must be scrubbed from the ivory tower. Congress wrote a bill (HR 3077) to revise the procedures for Title VI (Area Studies) disbursements. In the Higher Education Act of 1965, the U.S. Congress included a section (Title VI) for the government to finance international education, both through the creation of Area Studies centers in several important institutions and through the promotion of foreign study by students. This provision allowed the expansion not only of Area Studies at these prestigious universities, but it also provided for the creation of faculty who would go and teach elsewhere in higher education

55

2005 Amerasia Journal

56

as well as in secondary education. HR 3077 does not want to revoke the finances for Area Studies. Instead, it recommends that the government appoint an International Education Advisory Board made up of members of the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and the Office of Homeland Security to “increase accountability by providing advice, counsel, and recommendations to Congress on international education issues for higher education.” The immediate context for the bill was the post9/11 debate over the lack of personnel within the government who can speak the languages of the regions where the U.S. Empire operates (Arabic being the main one), and the lack of intelligence specialists who provide information and analysis for the government. While 9/11 is the pretext for HR3077, in truth what has been proposed is simply a recycled bill that failed in 1992. Then Representative David Boren attempted to pass the National Security Education Act that wished to “produce an increased pool of applicants for work in the departments and agencies of the U.S. government with national security responsibilities.” What is at issue, less than 9/11, is the desire of conservatives to thrash Area Studies programs that have been severely transformed by the social forces set loose by the secularization of the academy, by the rise of multiculturalism, and eventually, by the popularity of Orientalism.2 HR3077 is a salvo against the type of academy the unfinished agenda of social justice has started to produce in the past three decades. If the direct assault is on Area Studies, its impact will be felt elsewhere, including, as I will show below, in Ethnic Studies (the parent company of Asian American Studies). Despite its origins as an adjunct of Washington and the Church, Area Studies underwent a major assault on these connections during the era of the Vietnam War and in the midst of the social justice movements of the 1960s. Those who fought against the dominance of Church and Washington did not succeed in the full transformation of Area Studies, but they certainly put its high priests on the defensive, and they attracted large numbers of new graduate students who were not keen on being the intellectual auxiliary of imperialism. It is against these progressive social forces that Kurtz thundered before Congress, “The core premises of postcolonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power.” “Postcolonial theory” stands in for the very set of social forces arrayed against the twin ideas that knowledge of the rest of the world must objectify the peoples of

Vijay Prashad

the world, and that the fruits of this research should benefit the U.S. state. Apart from the question of complicity, there are far more “core premises” of postcolonial theory, most of which are epistemological rather than political. It is nonetheless true that Said spends a considerable part of the third section of Orientalism demanding that scholars reject the social scientific gloss given to old-fashioned Orientalism, for the former is simply a more sophisticated version of the latter’s history of complicity with colonialism. The U.S. form of social science Orientalism forms is part of a network that links “corporate business, the foundations, the oil companies, the missions, the military, the foreign service, the intelligence community together with the academic world.”3 This complex of power that produces the frame of reference and representation of the Arab lands, Said noted, has to be confronted, and in a humanist gesture, the space of academics should maintain its separation from this nexus.4 Most of Area Studies did not respond well to Said and to the postcolonial critique that Orientalism provoked. Indeed, while some scholars within Area Studies did open their disciplines to its critique, the book (and later that type of critique) evoked disdain.5 Much of what postcolonial studies demanded of Area Studies had already begun at the initiative of scholars who resented the use of their disciplines by U.S. imperialism. Toward the end of Orientalism, Said notes, “The Committee of Concerned Asia Scholars (who are primarily American) led a revolution during the 1960s in the ranks of East Asia specialists; the African studies specialists were similarly challenged by revisionists; so too were other Third World area specialists.”6 In 1964, the U.S. government launched Project Camelot to finance scholars who would study the “social processes which must be understood in order to deal effectively with problems of insurgency.” When anthropologist Eric Wolf and others revealed the scheme, scholars of Latin America and elsewhere rebelled against governmental intrusion.7 The Association of Concerned African Scholars emerged in 1977 to ensure that the famine-failure story of Africa not disguise continued imperial interests in the raw materials and markets of the continent, and that the U.S. collaboration with South Africa not be mirrored in the classroom. Said regrets that Middle East Studies did not have a similar challenge.8 These tendencies continue a very serious struggle against a very orthodox segment that continues to exercise power over the foundations and the universities (thus, jobs).

57

2005 Amerasia Journal

58

The State (and its proxy, Kurtz) has not attacked Area Studies for its epistemological Orientalism, for its clumsy use of cultural boundaries, and indeed not for its conservative politics. Quite the contrary. The State has come on the side of this reactionary segment of the academy to flush out those who have tried to reconstruct what is valuable within Area Studies (the concern with language and with a scrupulous immersion in cultural dynamics). One of the agents of change, interestingly, has been Ethnic Studies. While Area Studies stumbled before the critique of exoticism and racism, Ethnic Studies, which had emerged out of an anti-racist, social justice tradition and yet studied those of color otherwise marginalized by the academy, provided some of the conceptual tools necessary for reconstruction. Ethnic Studies journals such as The Black Scholar (1969), Amerasia (1971), Aztlan (1971), American Indian Quarterly (1974) offer an indication of the type of intellectual work underway that threatened the epistemological architecture of the Orientalist approach to knowledge creation. They understood both the need for the participation of the “community” in the research as an active element (and not simply as an object to be scrutinized from outside), and the importance of action-oriented research that, while not instrumentally driven by politics, worked to change the world rather than simply to interpret it. These journals accumulated work that offered a critique of the European notion of nationalism, whose borders had been suffused with racism and exclusion from the get-go. When journals such as Diaspora (1991) and Public Culture (1988, a product of the Society for Transnational Cultural Studies) emerged more than a decade later, they did so not so much on the novelty of their ideas, but in the institutional furrows ploughed by Ethnic Studies (and, as the English Department’s imported it, Cultural Studies). “Diaspora” and “transnationalism” came to the tired framework of Cold War Area Studies as a breath of epistemological fresh air. The end of the Cold War and the inability of many Area Studies departments to attract students who had begun to take an interest in the work done under the name of “postcolonial studies” or even “transnationalism” drew many of these departments to rethink their work in their light. Whether this was a fad or not is irrelevant.9 The point is that Area Studies began to draw on the gains of counter-disciplines like Ethnic Studies, even when it treated the latter as a poor cousin, and often sim-

Vijay Prashad

ply adopted the terms of “diaspora” and “transnational” without an engagement with the social justice core within the legacy of Ethnic Studies. The Ford Foundation disbursed upwards of $25 million over six years in the early 1990s for a project entitled “Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies.” Program Officer Toby Alice Volkman noted: Recent developments have challenged some of the premises of area studies itself. The notion, for example, that the world can be divided into knowable, self-contained “areas” has come into question as more attention has been paid to movements between areas. Demographic shifts, diasporas, labor migrations, the movements of global capital and media, and processes of cultural circulation and hybridization have encouraged a more subtle and sensitive reading of areas’ identity and composition.10

A large number of colleges and universities that secured grants had proposed to rethink Area Studies in accord with the concept of “diaspora.” Some of the best work that emerged from Area Studies in the 1990s grew from the critiques of postcolonial studies and from the categories that emerged out of Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies and the other counter-disciplinary frameworks such as these. In other words, Area Studies had been battered once in the 1960s to forgo its intimate relations to Washington and to the agenda of U.S. primacy, and in 1990, large parts of institutional Area Studies began to draw from the well of the counter-disciplinary formations. The assault on Area Studies represented by HR3077, then, is not simply an attack on a moribund set of institutionally compromised departments, but it is a wide-ranging attack on the very traditions of counter-disciplinary and counter-hegemonic work being done in the progressive sections of the academy for the past thirty years. HR3077 did not go forward in 2004. The Senate Subcommittee on Education’s Democratic Party members held firm against its passage, and the Republicans did not engage them. They had other things on their immediate agenda. This does not mean that the game is over. By all accounts, a version of HR3077 will return, and it will once more couch its general assault on counter-disciplinary work as an attack on Area Studies in particular. Ethnic Studies, which shares the epistemological premises and the political outlook of what is being assaulted, should join this struggle. After all, an Ethnic Studies that is itself now under pressure to study new immigrants who speak many languages would need the kinds of skills already well honed within Area Studies—not 59

only language training, but also access to the archive of cultural traditions and contradictions. If the State begins to police and regulate Area Studies, it will have an immediate and chilling effect on Ethnic Studies. It is important for Asian American Studies and Amerasia to engage with the work of Edward Said, but it is even more important to honor his legacy by getting into the trenches to insure the institutional formations whose expiry would mean the demise of the issues raised by Orientalism.

Amerasia Journal

2005

Notes

60

*These remarks formed the basis for my contribution to a symposium at Smith College entitled “Fear, Loathing and Surveillance: Post-Colonial and Feminist Scholarship After 9/11,” on February 26, 2005, organized by Elisabeth Armstrong and Amrita Basu. 1. Cynthia Ann Humes, review of All the Mothers are One: Hindu India and the Cultural Reshaping of Psychoanalysis by Stanley Kurtz. Journal of Asian Studies 53:1 (1994), 258. 2. George M. Marsden and Bradley J. Longfield, eds., The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon, “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business,” in Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996) and Abdiraham A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London: Verso Books, 2002). 3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 301-302. 4. The best review of Said’s book, and indeed even as it has been pilloried, the best elaboration of what is useful in Said, is Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature (London: Verso, 1992), 159-219. An issue of the journal Public Culture 6.1 (1993) went after Ahmed’s book with surprising vehemence. 5. Perhaps the most willing field was anthropology, itself already being refashioned by senior members of the profession. The American Anthropological Association invited Edward Said to give an important, and well attended, lecture at the 1987 Chicago meeting, which later appeared as “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15.2 (1989), 205-225. 6. Said, 301. 7. The documents are collected in Irving Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Sciences and Practical Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967). 8. Nevertheless, there is now a radical rightist academic militia—much of it provoked by the impact of Said’s work—that patrols Middle East Studies: Martin Kramer not only produced a book to denounce the field (Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, 2001), but also an organization (Middle East Forum—directed by Kramer’s comrade-in-arms, Daniel Pipes) and a website (http://www.campuswatch.org) to monitor the field. 9. This was the worry of critics of the Social Science Research Council when it began to restructure its own dwindling financial house in the 1990s. The SSRC’s new direction into transnational or cross-regional work provoked

E. San Juan, Jr.

10.

the fear that it would “tear international scholarship from the rich, textured empirical base that has been assiduously developed through decades of research.” Robert Huber, Blair Ruble and Peter Stavrakis, “Post-Cold War ‘International’ Scholarship: A Brave New World or the Triumph of Form Over Substance?” SSRC Items (March-April 1995), quoted in Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies During and After the Cold War,” in Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179. Toby Alice Volkman, “Introduction,” Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies (New York: Ford Foundation, 1999), ix.

Edward Said’s Use-Value for Asian American Cultural Projects E. San Juan, Jr. E. SAN JUAN, JR. heads the Philippines Cultural Studies Center at Storrs, Connecticut, and also sits on the Board of Directors of the Philippine Forum, New York City. He was recently visiting professor of literature and cultural studies at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and Fulbright professor of American Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His most recent book is Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell University Press, 2004).

Can Edward Said’s ideas be appropriated for Asian American Studies? Why not? The more provocative question is, which of his ideas? And for what purpose? Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Said has been credited with inaugurating a whole slew of disciplinary approaches, among them postcolonial criticism, colonial discourse analysis, and of late, “accidental feminism.” Said himself disclaimed the vacuous postcolonial babble in vogue, dismissed “postcolonial” as a misnomer, and affirmed his interest in analyzing neocolonial structures of dependency imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on the global South.1 He was of course for women’s liberation in general. Who would not be? Whether he was a humanist or not, in the traditional sense of defending classical European civilization from the barbaric “Others,” is mischievous speculation. Over against fashionable deconstructive modes of inquiry, Said clearly preferred Gramsci’s historicizing method of inventory to Foucault’s genealogy, adding that he was “always trying to gear my writing not towards the theoretical constituency but towards a po61

2005 Amerasia Journal

62

litical constituency.”2 Proof of this is his prodigious critiques of the Israeli state’s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people and the unconscionable support of the U.S. governing elite to this continuing outrage. There is something salutary in reminding ourselves that notwithstanding Maxine Hong Kingston’s intervention in 1975 (the publication of Woman Warrior), it was Orientalism that may have effectively “opened the way for a thoroughgoing critique of the discursive production of ‘other’ spaces,” as David PalumboLiu suggests.3 Actually, Said did not initiate this genre of debunking, but he was certainly persuasive and strategic in the way he performed his task. Said himself learned a lot from Foucault and poststructuralist thought, although he inflected the archaelogical and demystifying mode of interpretation: reading, for Said, engages traditional literary forms in the light of known communal criteria and secular pursuits. His career evolved from the textual free play and undecidabilities of Beginnings (1975) to the more determinate critiques of Orientalism whose ideological and political premises are more fully articulated in The World, the Text and the Critic (1991) and, more substantially, in Culture and Imperialism (1993). I think the lessons of Culture and Imperialism, as well as of the essays collected in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000), should be the locus of our attention if we want to find out how we can use Said’s optic, particularly his contrapuntal deployment of historical, cultural and ideological motifs, in revitalizing the rather repetitious, banalizing, if not opportunist, clichés of current Asian American Studies sanctified in the orthodoxies of our hoary curricula and formulas enshrined in our canonical texts. Like most intellectuals in the U.S. academy, Said’s work illustrates a postmodernist eclectic style proud of its complexity, its nuanced cosmopolitanism, and openness to experimentation. The institution of the U.S. university afforded him opportunities but also self-internalized constraints. Despite Said’s erudite appropriation of themes and concepts from the rich archive of the Marxist tradition, from Lukács, Gramsci, Fanon and C.L.R. James, and despite his commitment to the revolutionary aspirations of the Palestinian intifada, he was never able fully to situate culture and its diverse expressive forms within the dynamic of the altering historical modes of production and reproduction in specific social formations. His training was extremely confined to the literary and philological, even though he tried to apply, with suave

E. San Juan, Jr.

sophistication, his knowledge of economic, political, and philosophical ideas to the hermeneutics and judgment of cultural forms and practices. But, as I explained in Racism and Cultural Studies,4 it was not so much a lack of knowledge as a deliberate refusal to historicize power relations in concrete material conditions (a method deployed by Raymond Williams, whom Said admired) that limited Said’s insightful readings of novels, opera, poetry, etc. One example is his rather moralistic and psychologizing essay, “Yeats and Decolonization,”5 whose self-serving exchange value is replicated by Asian American postcolonials seeking a niche in the Project for a New American Century. So what particular use-value relevant to resolving the Asian American crisis can we import from Said? What I am proposing is that we avoid the pedagogical limitations of Said’s rather neoliberal understanding of power relations, and focus instead on his mode of criticizing the doxa of institutional disciplinary regimes. This critique may be discerned in his numerous books on the Palestinian struggle. One can also trace the dialectical logic of this critique in one of his last essays, “The Clash of Definitions.”6 On the one hand, Said cogently exposes the invidious rhetoric of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and its reified concepts that distort the real world, a metaphysics of ideological manipulation. On the other hand, Said rejects the notion that all of reality can be reduced to tropes, constructed figures, metanarratives, etc. For Said, the world’s complexity requires an apparatus and sensibility that can capture its changes, overlaps, mixtures, variations, crossings, migrations, etc. In short, we need to test our theories against the reality of the world and not settle into the rut of conformism. Thus Said, valuing more adequately the insurrectionary example of Fanon, revised his judgment of Lukács (in his later essay on “Traveling Theory Reconsidered”) in response to the resurgence of anti-capitalist struggles in the nineties. Eloquently formulated in essays such as “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community,” as well as the instructive “On Defiance and Taking Positions,” Said’s lesson for Asian American scholars—the use-value of his critical “worldliness” in permanently interrogating the established consensus— may be summed up in one word: defiance. Notes 1.

Edward W. Said, “Edward Said in Conversation with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul, and Ania Loomba, New Delhi, 16 December 1997),” Interventions 1:1 (1998/1999), 81-96.

63

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

Ibid., 92. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 304. E. San Juan, Jr., Racism and Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Edward W. Said, “Yeats and Decolonization,” in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Edward W. Said, “The Clash of Definitions,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Traveling Theory, Transforming Criticism: Edward W. Said in Taiwan* Te-hsing Shan

Amerasia Journal

2005

TE-HSING SHAN, former President of the English and American Literature Association, ROC, is a Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica. His translation of Said’s Power, Politics, and Culture has been published in Taiwan and is forthcoming in Mainland China.

64

Theory transforms when it travels, as Edward W. Said tells us in his essay, “Traveling Theory.” What happens to Said’s critical ideas when they travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries to reach a country such as Taiwan? In Taiwan, Said’s ideas appear in three different forms, roughly in the order of academic discourse, translation, and public discourse. The first begins with scholars of foreign literature, mainly those in English departments working on minority and postcolonial discourse. It can be rightly claimed that Said’s concepts have been so influential that virtually all those scholars have been affected by—and have even internalized—his concepts one way or the other. However, representations of Said’s work in academic discourse are rather partial and fragmentary, mainly drawing from his critique of Orientalism and the issues of representation. Very few studies have been devoted to a metacritical examination of his ideas. As a result, most readers, if they read academic discourse at all, get the impression that Said appears sporadically, criticizing Western representations of the Orient. A more complete representation of Said in the Chinese-speaking world had to wait for translations of his work, and it was a

Te-hsing Shan

Edward Said and Te-hsing Shan in Said’s office, August 19, 1997. Photograph courtesy of Te-hsing Shan.

long wait. In his interview with Mark Edmundson in 1993, Said mentioned that a Chinese translation of Orientalism was completed but not yet published. It was already fifteen years after the publication of this monumental work. However, the first Chinese translation of his book did not appear until 1997, and it was not Orientalism, but rather my translation of Representations of the Intellectual (which was reissued in Mainland China in 2002). As a scholar-cum-translator with a sincere admiration for Said, I chose to frame his work and represent Said the intellectual in the following way: in addition to the full translation of the text, I added a critical introduction, some translator’s notes, an interview I conducted, the aforementioned interview by Edmundson, an annotated bibliography of his books, an English-Chinese index, and a Chinese-English index. This translation was selected as one of the 1997 Top Ten Best Books by the China Times and won a 1997 Top Ten Book Award from the United Daily News. Later on, Chinese translations of Said’s books began to appear in Taiwan more quickly and were all well reviewed and received: Orientalism (1999), Out of Place (2000), Culture and Imperialism (2001), Covering Islam (2002), Culture and Resistance (2004), and Freud and the Non-European (2004). (As an aside, I was invited to write critical

65

2005 Amerasia Journal

66

introductions to Out of Place and Covering Islam and to write book reviews for Culture and Imperialism and Culture and Resistance). Whereas these translations provide more complete access to Said’s individual works, translations of other books by him on literary and cultural theory, music, Middle East politics, and Palestinian affairs are still lacking. These translations have helped introduce Said and his ideas not only to the general reading public, but also to people actively involved in Taiwan’s public sphere. While generally recognized as an internationally known Palestinian American scholar based at Columbia University, Said exerts his influence on Taiwan’s public discourse mainly by what he says and does as an intellectual. Scholars, writers, columnists, and media workers draw inspiration from Said whenever need arises, especially regarding his insistence on the role of the intellectual as an outsider speaking truth to power (in Mainland China, in addition, sometimes he has even been hailed, perhaps against his grain, as a relentless fighter in strong opposition to the West). With his long-term advocacy for Middle East peace by way of mutual recognition and respect between Palestinians and Israelis, Said has become a role model and the moral conscience in the eyes of many in Taiwan. In short, Said’s images in academic discourse, translation, and public discourse reinforce each other to a great extent, as they depend on scholars, translators, and public figures to disseminate his ideas. A few observations can thus be drawn. First, as it takes time for theory to travel, the representations of Said’s ideas in Taiwan are necessarily characterized by their belatedness. Second, as representations are never full and faithful, to represent Said in another linguistic and cultural environment is destined to be partial, uneven, and incomplete. Most important, these (mis)representations and transformations depend heavily on local conditions. If theory is something universal, then these transformations are precisely where the universal and the local meet. In other words, the local provides a test case for the applicability and universality of ideas which travel here. Over the past few years, I have been offering courses on Said and Chinese American literary/cultural studies at the graduate institutes of foreign literatures in both National Taiwan University and National Chiao Tung University. At the beginning of each semester, I ask my students to fill out a questionnaire. It is worth noting, based on my informal survey, that students’

Henry Yu

impressions of Said mainly come from Representations of the Intellectual, Out of Place, and Orientalism, reflecting the impressions of the general reading public in Taiwan. In my Chinese American literature class, when Said or his ideas are mentioned, most of the time students refer to his critique of the East/West binarism, the distorted images of the Orient, and the power-knowledge relationship therein. Sometimes it seems that Said’s ideas have been deeply internalized and taken for granted. Paradoxically, faithful to Said’s oppositional spirit and his emphasis on geography, students and scholars in Taiwan (which is located in the so-called Far East, as distinguished from Said’s Middle East and Islamic world) often come up with an “alternative Orient.” On the one hand, this alternative Orient questions Said’s well known version and many ideas linked to this version. On the other hand, it confirms Said’s argument that labels such as “Orient” and “Occident” are but fictional, provisional, and man-made constructs which can be unmade and remade. I have been privileged to teach Said in graduate schools, to be the first translator of Said’s book in the Chinese-speaking world, and to interview him three times in his office at the Philosophy Hall on Columbia University campus. To me, Edward Said was a critic, a humanist, an intellectual, and last but not least, a fellow human being. *This paper was presented at the “Translating Universals: Theory Moves Across Asia” conference at University of California, Los Angeles on January 21-22, 2005.

Edward Said, Dispeller of Delusions Henry Yu HENRY YU is an associate professor of history and Asian American Studies at UCLA and an associate professor of history at University of British Columbia. He is the author of Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2001) and is currently working on a book entitled How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes.

For years, I have assigned the first 110 pages of Edward Said’s Orientalism in my classes, hoping that my students will experience the same epiphany I felt almost two decades ago when I first read the book in an undergraduate class on Chinese his67

2005 Amerasia Journal

68

tory. I cannot say that mine was a religious awakening akin to the conversion experiences that the word epiphany suggests, but it was so much more than the Archimedean “Aha” moment that marks a sudden solution to a problem long puzzling. It was a revelation: what I had known before was false, and the truth I now knew so re-ordered the way I understood my world that I would never again be the same. Indeed, Orientalism was that most valuable of explanations, an answer to a question unasked, a solution that defined as a problem what heretofore had seemed unproblematic. Such realizations are rare, and although not all of my students seemed to have suffered the same, I have nevertheless seen enough to convince me that I am not alone. I have been trying to understand the nature of that revelation ever since it afflicted me so many years ago. The elegance of Said’s argument belied its complexity. He mixed simple formulations about the continuing recurrence of binary oppositions between East and West, Orient and Occident, with intricate arguments about the relationship of knowledge to power, of scholarship to colonialism, of ideas to violence. Orientalism was not just a set of ideas that made an exotic object called the “Orient,” it was a set of relations of power, a form of knowledge that inscribed upon people all kinds of meanings about ignorance, inferiority, sexuality, and most importantly, the desire for one set of people to dominate and control another. The pen was not only mightier than the sword in Said’s book, it wrote the justifications for the wielding of the sword, and at its most powerful even made the sword dispensable. Clerks and scholars, scribbling, and the taxonomies and tales they produced were not just the ephemera of colonial power, they were the very machinery of empire. Writing as a weapon, knowledge as a form of power and control—Said did not invent such analyses, but in Orientalism he produced perhaps the clearest and most resonant argument about how indispensable the pen was to the success of colonial and racial domination. As a Palestinian intellectual in exile, Said also served as an admirable model of how an “Oriental” could think and write in the face of such Orientalist knowledge. My engagement with Said carried me through my Ph.D. dissertation, and eventually a book, Thinking Orientals, with the very title an acknowledgment of the debt to his work. For me, Said’s effect on so many scholars is the best measure of his importance. Except for at the end when briefly discussing the United States, Said barely mentioned the “Far East” or “East

Henry Yu

Asia” in Orientalism, and yet his analysis had a tremendous effect on Asian Studies. The richness of his argument allowed it to be portable, carried into unforeseen domains and used in unusual ways. It was the portability of his interpretation that propelled Orientalism into Asian American Studies, allowing it to name the pain felt by all people who had been treated as “Orientals.” Could we imagine so much of the cultural studies in Asian American Studies of the last two decades without Said? I was also struck that I was not alone in assigning only the first 110 pages of Orientalism. Not just a concession to the page limit of undergraduate reading, this selection also reflected a strange paradox in Said’s argument—the first 110 pages make the most general claims, and the following sections are the most detailed in explication, and yet the clarity and persuasiveness of Said’s argument lessened with the increase in detail. As a historian by training, I could not escape the discomfort that this was rhetorically the opposite of a well made argument. But the resonance to many of Orientalism as an argument did not lie in its details—it was to be found in its appeal to those who had felt the sting of being the object of someone else’s curiosity, to those who had known what it was like to be the exotic object of someone else’s desire to know. Each time I read Orientalism, I felt anew how angry it was, despite the calm tone of its explication. Said was a quintessential “thinking Oriental” and his argument was what an “Oriental” thinks of a thousand years of Orientalist knowledge. How could it not be angry? Said was that rarest of public intellectuals, one whose polemical cause could be expressed effectively as an enlightened, academic argument. Perhaps that was why the reactions to his arguments were so dichotomous—some worshipped him, and others thought him dangerous to the point of evil. I remember the first time I saw Edward Said in person, delivering a paper to the Shelby Cullom Davis Center Colloquium at Princeton University. The room was packed on a Friday morning, and friends and enemies, both old and new, interspersed amongst the curious looking for a spectacle. He had presented some of the material that would form a chapter in the book Culture and Imperialism that would appear several years later. During the heated question-and-answer period, an old enemy stood behind Said and delivered a challenge, anachronistically waving his cane as he pledged to defend the honor of one of the Brontë sisters, or perhaps it was Jane Eyre—the scene entered my memory suffused

69

Amerasia Journal

2005

with such a sense of the surreal that I cannot quite believe my recall of the details, and it is not beyond the realm of the real that someone would duel over the honor of a fictional character. Throughout this impassioned offensive, Said sat impassively with his back to the waving cane, never once turning to acknowledge the man behind him. Finally, when the invective had ended, Said in a calm and even voice dismissed the challenge, observing curtly that he was already well acquainted with the man’s “addle-pated” musings—next question. A number of fairly intelligent graduate students later scrambled to find dictionaries to decipher his succinct and deadly insult, a dagger so gilded with gentility and erudition that it seemed to have been unsheathed in an Oxford chamber filled with pipe smoke and glasses of port. I remembered the exchange because it seemed to me to reflect many of the contradictions of Said as an intellectual, of Orientalism as an interpretation, and of the life of “thinking Orientals” all over the world. Said was cultured and civilized, in every sense of how those words convey the highest attainments of learning and cultivation. He embodied the ideals of European Enlightenment—understood from an education at the best schools in the world the joys of knowledge, of scholarship, of the life of learning. He was a music critic, equally adept at speaking about classical music or American jazz, trained to appreciate the subtleties contained in the finest compositions. And yet he also embodied a millennium of what it was like to be the object of European knowledge, a category of the taxonomist rather than the taxonomist himself, the exotic Oriental in the midst of the Enlightened institutions that had buttressed so much of “Western” imperialism. What an existence that must have been! What discipline and perspicacity it must have taken to discern what was defensible and admirable against what was delusion and oppression. What a record he has left for us in his works of what it means to think in just ways, to struggle both within and without, to strive to salvage what should be retained while attacking what must be destroyed.

70