Orientalism between the Desire to Harm and the Desire for Knowledge, Journal of the Society for Asian Humanities, Vol. 52, 2020–21

 JOSAH, Journal of the Society for Asian Humanities, Vol. 52, 2020–21

Special Issue

 

What’s in a Name? After Orientalism

Guest Editors

Olivier Krischer and Meaghan Morris

 

Remembrance Note: Vale Rosita Holenbergh (1937–2020)

 

Jocelyn Chey               1

 

Introduction

Olivier Krischer and Meaghan Morris            3

 

From Oriental Studies to Inter-Asia Referencing: The 2019 A.R. Davis Memorial Lecture

Adrian Vickers            12

 

Islamic Central Asia and the Russian-Soviet Orient

Adeeb Khalid              36

 

Coordinating Contemporary Asia in Art Exhibitions

C.J.W.-L. Wee            54

 

Nusantara, Bilad al-Jawa, the Malay World: Cultural-Geographical Constructions of Maritime Southeast Asia and Endogenous Terms as Palimpsests

Imran bin Tajudeen     80

 

 

Round Table: After Orientalism

 

Three Ways of Relating to Orientalism

Chih-ming Wang        105

 

After Orientalism

John Frow 110

 

Orientalism between the Desire to Harm and the Desire for Knowledge 

Ghassan  Hage            114

 

Oriental Philology after Orientalism

Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan               120

 

De-imagining Tibet: Beyond Orientalism, Reverse Orientalism and Other Traps in the Study of Himalayan Histories

Jim Rheingans             126

 

‘Orientalism’ and After: Impacting Feminist Theory in India

Tejaswini Niranjana    135

 

Orientalisms in China

Huaiyu Chen               141

 

Designing Japan’s Orient: Department Stores and the Modern Experience 

Nozomi Naoi               147

 

Saidian Time: Orientalism at the Fulcrum of Global Histories of Art

Mary Roberts              154

 

Scholarship at the Edge: Reflections about Teaching History

of the Arab World and Islam in Australia after Orientalism

Lucia Sorbera              162

 

Endemic Orientalism

Tessa Morris-Suzuki   168

 

Review Essay

On the Sources of Lu Xun’s Treatise on Māra Poetry: Some Issues and a Few Answers

Jon Eugene von Kowallis             172

 

 

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Orientalism between the Desire to Harm and the Desire for Knowledge

Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne

 

There is no doubt that one of the more powerful dimensions of Edward Said’s Orientalism is the way he peeled away the layers of ‘objectivity’ in which Orientalist knowledge had wrapped itself. He showed how this objectivity was political through and through. But behind this claim is a difficult assumption that I want to explore: what made a thought ‘Orientalist’ for Said was its effect rather than the intention of those who articulated it. This was because, regardless of individual intentions, such a thought, as a whole, inherited Orientalist categories and reproduced them. In so doing, it was part of the practical colonial assemblage that produced the very Orientalist reality it was being ‘objective’ about.

 

Those of us who work within the anthropological and sociological tradition have no problem thinking this way. We have internalised quite well the Durkheimian idea that things like Orientalism, or even more generally racism, are social facts. Thus, what makes them important to us is that they represent macrosocial realities that cannot be reduced to individuals and their intentions. This idea is implicit throughout Orientalism.

 

But there is a contradiction here between claiming that a certain mode  of thinking is complicit in the construction of reality and saying that the way this thinking is actually produced by the individuals who produced it matters very little in this process of construction. It is clear, in Said’s account at least, that he does care about the difference between what he called the ‘great Orientalist works of genuine scholarship like Silvestre de Sacy’s Chrestomathie arabe or Edward William Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians’ and the outright racist works of people like Renan and Gobineau, not to mention the Orientalist-inspired Victorian pornographic novels. However, despite that difference Said also wanted to argue that they all ‘came out of the same impulse’ (1). It seems that it is the latter part of this argument that dominates the imagination of a number of postcolonial critics today who care little for such nuance and for whom the respect for scholarship despite it being Orientalist seems unthinkable. People who, guided by a desire to know, have produced scholarship of exceptional quality are dismissed for various reasons as ‘Orientalists’ or ‘racists’ tout court. That the reasons for which they are accused of being colonialists or racists or Orientalists are sometimes good reasons does not make the categorisation of such academics as ‘racist’ or ‘Orientalist’ any less reductive. It is as if scholarship can be reduced to its political moment.

 

The way Orientalism has circulated as a critical mode of classification inside and outside the academic world is quite similar to the circulation of the category ‘petit bourgeois’ as it evolved out of the Marxist tradition. Both Edward Said and Karl Marx took a pre-existing category and transformed  it by giving it both a critical analytical and a radical political component. But both reinforced or injected into the radical political facet a derogatory dimension. This is why, while the fusion of the analytical and the political marks both categories, it is also the case that, with both, it is not easy to work out when the deployment of the term analytically ends and when political abuse begins. That is, it is not easy to know when we are trying to make critical sense of someone’s piece of writing, or their way of thinking or behaving, and when we are seeing them as political enemies that we wish to metaphorically if not literally obliterate. One would perhaps wish that this latter usage could be found more in the populist rather than academic deployment of the term, but as noted above this is far from being the case.  I feel that allowing this political/abusive dimension to take precedence over intellectual critique marks a certain failure of the academic imagination. Let me rush in saying that I am not critiquing this failure from a position of the one-who-never-fails. This is far from being the case. Indeed, what I want  to do in this brief essay is reflect on the limitations of thinking Orientalism within a register of political abuse, not so much by criticising others but by taking three cases where I deployed, or thought of deploying, the concept as a kind of swear word myself.

 

A friend who was starting a new literary magazine asked me if I would review the novels and interview the author of a series of thrillers set in the Middle East. The author happened to be visiting Sydney. As I began reading the novels it became clear to me that the negative stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims was too systematic to be accidental. Here is part of what I wrote:

I enjoy thrillers. I like all sorts … ignoring the warning and protestations of people around me concerning the sexism, racism and violence that I am about to be subjected to. I switch off my over-intellectualised mind and plunge into a thriller’s world.… To me, it’s like listening to Chuck Berry’s rock ’n’ roll. Go Johnny, go, go.

I tell you all this because I am about to launch into a serious critique of Daniel  Easterman’s  thrillers  and  I  don’t  want  you  to  think  of  me  as  some boring person who cannot appreciate a thriller for what it is. I am truly sorry … (for while reading Easterman) no matter how much I tried, I could not hear Chuck Berry singing.

 

Here is, for example, how he introduces ‘the Arab’—who remains unnamed the rest of his very short life:

‘He was small, thickset, with shifty eyes and a furtive manner. He was the sort that masturbated without enjoying it. David guessed that he fantasised about fifteen-stone women with massive breasts and pouting lips called Fatima’. (2)

This was the first of many passages like this. I remember reading them and, as I did, Orientalism as a category of abuse directed at the author rushed into my mind. I thought, ‘You racist Orientalist fucker’.

 

I will go back to the above soon, but I will describe the other two incidents first. Here is the second. It’s late 2011 and I am having an argument with    a colleague, and up till then a friend, about the Syrian war that started in March that year. He is showing more sympathy to Bashar Assad’s claim    to represent an ‘anti-imperialist’ force than I would. So I criticise his views in quite a trenchant manner. Perhaps because I was quite aggressive in critiquing him, he rushed into critiquing me back, but in a way that left me pretty much shaken. This was a debate happening publicly in an Australian anthropological forum, and he directed his reply not so much to me but     to the listeners. For whatever reason, what he thought was important for those listeners to know was that, according to him, to understand my views on Syria one needs to understand my family history in Lebanon and the way they think about Syria. What took me aback was not how empirically ignorant his suggestion was, though this was itself quite astounding: he got the conventional views of Maronite Christians about the Syrian government totally wrong. What really got to me was that I was having an argument that I thought was between colleagues, in a space where it was our professional background that mattered most, and here was someone bringing ‘my family history’ into the equation and naturalising the fact that, ‘of course’, this being my ‘family history’, it’s something I would primordially adhere to rather than have my own views about the matter. I was actually being ‘Orientalised’. What made it worse, even though I do not recall anyone’s family history being brought into the equation in that forum, before or since, was that not one of the Australian anthropologists listening seemed to notice that there was anything worth openly objecting to here. As my colleague was an ardent Foucauldian, I nearly said, ‘I don’t ever recall you attributing any of Foucault’s political views to him traditionally taking on board his family history’. But I didn’t for what had totally invaded my mind and what I wanted to say most was, ‘You little Orientalist prick!’ It was the end of our friendship.

 

Now let me briefly go through the third incident. I am at a public discussion organised by a community organisation. It was yet another debate about ‘Islam and the veil’. It followed the French government’s decision to ban the Islamic veil in public institutions. The man, an Anglo-Australian teacher married to a Muslim woman, was defending the right of Muslim women to wear the veil. He said to the audience that while he is not Muslim himself he is married to a Muslim, and he has taken it upon himself to   read the Qur’an from which he was quoting copiously to explain why it is important for Muslim women to wear the veil. I started getting irritated with him as the panel conversation evolved as he was literally chain-quoting from the Qur’an to justify every single proposition he was making. I raised my eyebrows and said to my companion sitting next to me, ‘Why is it him and not his wife speaking? Perhaps she’d be less inclined to quote from the Qur’an and we wouldn’t have to be subjected to this Orientalist crap’. My friend who was not an academic asked me, ‘Why is that Orientalist?’ I gave him a standard answer, ‘You wouldn’t explain everything that Australians do by referring to its justification in the Bible just because they are Christians, so why assume that the Qur’an is where you need to start to understand what Arab Muslims do just because they are Muslims’.

 

My friend took the above well, but he said, ‘Still, I don’t see why you are so irritated with him. He meant well’. It struck me how little room there     is today in postcolonial critique for recognising the difference between the knowledge that is complicit with colonialism because ‘it means harm’ and the knowledge that is complicit despite ‘meaning well’. After all, I can clearly say that in directing a single mode of political abuse at ‘Orientalism’ in the cases above I have homogenised what are three very distinct situations. In the case of Daniel Easterman, I am convinced that we are dealing with a racist: that is someone who means harm. To critique such people for their ‘essentialism’ and ‘misrepresentation’ is to mistake them for people animated by the desire to know. They don’t desire to know. They desire to hurt. Their aim is to misrepresent even when they know. Now, to equate the Orientalism of such people with the Orientalism of the last speaker, who is precisely animated by the desire to know, is not only unjust but is clearly politically absurd and irrational. Even if we establish that he is guilty of reproducing an Orientalist reality through his religious textual essentialism, this certainly does not warrant throwing political abuse in his direction.

 

But what about the case of my colleague who Orientalised me by making me my family’s views’ unproblematic conduit? Even if this was the most upsetting case of Orientalisation for me personally, we cannot equate what my colleague did with Easterman’s desire to harm. To begin with, this case highlights the fact that our judgments are related to our expectations. If an intellectually unsophisticated person started talking about my family in this way I would have felt that they should be corrected, but I wouldn’t have felt as bad. If I felt as bad as I did with my colleague it is because I expected better from a professional. At the very least, I expect professionalism to translate into more reflexivity. This brings us to another point highlighted by this case: among academics, we will hardly find racists and Orientalists of the Easterman type. The intent to harm is almost non-existent. Orientalism as a political accusation here is not a matter of either/or but a matter of more or less—a more or less that is dependent on degrees of reflexivity, that is, an awareness of the conditions of production of one’s own categories of thought. There is today a postcolonial critique that sees itself as engaged in the decolonisation of theory in the way Althusser invited Marxist philosophers to see their critical writings as class struggle in philosophy. In both cases we see a collapsing of the intellectual and the political as if they occupy the same space without any autonomy of one from the other. In this short essay, I have tried to show that in the field of Orientalism, not only do the political and the scholarly not coincide, they can actually be in a contradictory relation. Knowing how to situate oneself in such a contradiction is crucial for the production of both good political critique and good scholarship.

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1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 8.

2. Ghassan Hage, Editions 1 (1989): 14–15.