Liverpool University Press

Chapter Title: (Not) Reading Orientalism

Book Title: Interdisciplinary Measures

Book Subtitle: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies
Book Author(s): Graham Huggan
Published by: Liverpool University Press. (2008)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjj2w.16

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Liverpool University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Interdisciplinary Measures

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 C hapter 1 2

(Not) Reading Orientalism

Few texts could be more excessive, in terms of their production and reception,
than Orientalism (1978), the best-known book of a man whose death took away
from us one of the most eloquent and forceful public intellectuals of the present
day (Viswanathan xi). Orientalism, although frequently seen as flawed, even as
one of Edward Said’s weakest efforts, is far and away the most talked-about and
influential of the 20-odd books he wrote during an almost unimaginably prolific
career. The book, translated at the last count into 36 languages, is the product
of an equally protean personality, known alike for his ‘passionate humanism, his
cultivation and erudition, his provocative views, and his unswerving commitment
to the cause of Palestinian self-determination’ (Viswanathan xi–xii). Multiple and
wide-ranging contributions to the fields of literary scholarship, cultural politics
and music are less suggestive of the achievements of a single figure than of
several, while in the work itself the dizzying plurality of not always compat-
ible subjects, methods and approaches similarly presents us with not one but
a veritable surfeit of Saids. Given the astonishing range and lasting impact of
Said’s oeuvre, it is hardly surprising that there should now be a booming Said
industry, in which numerous scholars from all corners of the world have taken
the opportunity to engage in conversation – not all of it friendly – with his
work. To adapt a phrase applied by Henry Louis Gates to the great Martinican
psychiatrist and anti-colonial activist Frantz Fanon, we have been witnessing
for some time now an evolved form of ‘critical Saidism’ in which very different
readings are applied, and very ideological uses given, to Said’s work. Like Fanon
before him, Said was to become a talismanic intellectual and political figure,
while Orientalism, in particular, was to be transformed over time into one of the
late twentieth century’s few truly totemic critical works (Gates 457–58).
Why Orientalism? In a 1995 review essay, Gyan Prakash attributes the phenom-
enal success of Orientalism to its capacity to unsettle ‘received categories and
modes of understanding’ (n.p.). According to Prakash, Orientalism’s

196

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 196 11/3/08 09:20:56

 (Not) Reading Orientalism

[p]ersistent and restless movements between authorial intentions and discur-

sive regimes, scholarly monographs and political tracts, literature and history,
philology and travel writings, classical texts and twentieth-century polemics
produced a profound uncertainty [...] in which the established authority of
Orientalist scholars and their lines of inquiry [came] undone. [The] ambivalent
effect of Orientalism [invited] charges of undisciplined thinking and ideological
bad faith, and prompt[ed] critics to force its unsettling movement between
different positions into an either/or choice which they then target[ed] for criti-
cism. Significantly, it [was] precisely such boundary-crossings and stagings
of contrary positions that [proved] to be the most productive and influential
maneuvers, inciting further critical studies of the modern West’s construction
of the Other. Such studies [...] elaborated and extended its argument, and
Said himself [went] on to produce other studies of the relationship between
Western power and knowledge. But Orientalism’s authority as a critique of
Western knowledge remains unmatched, and continues to derive force from
its subversive violation of borders. (n.p.)

This is an astute and, I would argue, fairly accurate account of the impact
of Orientalism both on contemporaneous readers in the late 1970s and on a
generation of self-styled ‘oppositional’ critics – postcolonial, feminist, minority-
activist – ever since. Not all of these readers, needless to say, have agreed with
the central tenets of Orientalism, and much of the oppositional criticism that the
book has generated derived its momentum from aspects of Said’s argument to
which it is itself often vehemently opposed. Broadly speaking, three patterns in
the critical response to Orientalism have established themselves. The first of these
patterns involves what might be called the ‘de-Orientalization’ of Orientalism
(the method). As Lisa Lowe has suggested, Orientalism is more historically and
geographically heterogeneous than many readers have given Said credit for;
the Orient to which he refers, at different moments and in different interests,
may encompass all or parts of Central Asia, North Africa, Turkey and the Middle
East (Lowe 5). But given the fundamental heterogeneity and instability of the
discourses contained within the umbrella term ‘Orientalism’, why not cast the
net even wider? Lowe, for one, cannot resist, including a chapter in her book on
the utopian projection of Japan and China under French poststructuralism (ch.
5). Other critics have interpreted the range and scope of Orientalism even more
freely, using it, for example, as a critical tool for the unpacking of self-serving
European colonial constructions of ‘darkest Africa’ and their corresponding
cultural myths (Miller). Studies such as these, which Said welcomed (‘Orientalism
Reconsidered’ 140; see also Viswanathan 220), risk emptying out the already
mythologized category of the Orient, turning Orientalism into a codeword for
virtually any kind of othering process that involves the mapping of dominating
practices of knowledge/power onto peoples seen, however temporarily or
strategically, as culturally ‘marginal’, economically ‘undeveloped’ or psycho-
logically ‘weak’. The focus on the translocal or, perhaps better, the relocalized
representational and administrative mechanisms of Orientalism have produced
some powerful anti-authoritarian scholarship: in Japan and Latin America, for

197

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 197 11/3/08 09:20:56

 Literature, History, Memory

instance, and in many regions of the formerly colonized world. As might be

expected, though, the loosely rhetorical usage of the category of the Orient
that such an approach encourages has led at times to a re-inscription of the very
binaries (‘West’ versus ‘rest’ or, paradoxically, ‘West’ versus ‘East’) that Said’s
own work had previously gone to such lengths to resist.
A second pattern of response to Orientalism emerges here which we might
call the ‘re-Orientalization’ of Orientalism (the book). Within this pattern,
Orientalism’s exclusionary and immobilizing strategies are either inadvertently
reproduced by those who seek to uncover alternative examples of its workings
(‘anti-Orientalist Orientalism’) or are consciously deployed by those who,
constructing themselves as the West’s victims, turn against their adversaries
in uncompromising gestures of collective pride and righteous anti-imperialist
revenge (‘Occidentalism’). The phenomenon of ‘anti-Orientalist Orientalism’, in
particular, begs the question as to the self-replicating tendencies of Orientalism,
neatly captured in James Clifford’s almost apologetic suggestion that Said’s
book, for all the power of its criticism, ‘sometimes appears to mimic the essen-
tializing discourse it attacks’ (262). I will come back to this suggestion in detail
later, via Aijaz Ahmad’s caustic reading of Orientalism. For the moment, suffice
to point out a third category of response to Said’s text that draws attention,
explicitly or implicitly, to the unreflected Orientalism of Orientalism itself. This
largely hostile view of Orientalism (the book) is founded on a series of apparently
embarrassing paradoxes: that it reproduces the enumerative, patiently cumula-
tive and paternalistic methods of the ‘master’ Orientalists; that it reinstates
broad transhistorical and cultural generalization in the service of magisterial
expertise; that its seemingly counter-intuitive insistence on the internal consis-
tency of Orientalism is inconsistent with Said’s own Foucault-inspired discursive
methods (but remains uncannily consistent with the self-authorizing manoeu-
vres of classical Orientalism itself); and that it assembles a textualized Orient
with a view to establishing intellectual authority over it, even if this ‘textual,
contemplative’ Orient is never allowed, like its nineteenth-century historical
counterpart, to facilitate the control of the geographical Orient as an ‘economic,
administrative and even military space’ (Orientalism 210).
My own view is that these criticisms are largely valid, even if they flirt with the
kind of self-congratulatory abreaction that is perhaps more typical of second-
order (‘anti-Orientalist Orientalist’ and/or ‘Occidentalist’) responses to Said’s
work. What interests me in this particular chapter, however, is not to produce an
inventory of different (mis)readings of Orientalism but to show the link between
knowledge, power and authority that derives from the ways it has been read.
Read and not read, or at least often read in isolation or selectively; for one of the
most interesting aspects of the continuing saga of (not) reading Orientalism has
been a tendency to bypass the text, either in the interests of declaring a political
allegiance or in the more disguised attempt to make the book symptomatic for
the entirety of its author’s work. This tendency is all the more interesting given
the connections Said himself makes between Orientalist textuality and reading.
The Orientalists, Said suggests, produced – among several other things – a

198

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 198 11/3/08 09:20:56

 (Not) Reading Orientalism

kind of collective guidebook for uninitiated Western readers, but less a guide-
book that informed them than one that confirmed what they already knew
(Orientalism 81). Hence the constitutive tension in Orientalism between the
need to accumulate detailed scholarly knowledge of the Orient and the desire
to fall back on prescriptive formulations that distilled it into a version of what
was already known before. More knowledge was needed, but not really needed
since the Orient was already known (or at least intelligently intuited); more
reading was needed, but not really needed since it confirmed what had already
been written before. Images of the Orient were thus added to the stockpile of
familiar representations, while these individual images were made to stand in
metonymically for the Orient as a whole. Orientalism emerged as a coordinated
system of representations, structured largely through readily identifiable repeti-
tions, which perpetuated itself at the institutional level, eventually becoming
‘fully formalized into a repeatedly produced copy of itself ’ (Orientalism 197).
Prescriptive rather than descriptive, the Orientalist system of representation
was as likely to impede knowledge of the Orient as to produce it. Certainly it
was disinclined to the production of new knowledge: its contradictory reality
was that it fostered a ‘textual attitude’ or predisposition that allowed the
Orient to be regularly rewritten, but that effectively prevented it from being
critically reread (Orientalism 80–81). Now, while objections might be raised to
Said’s provocative account of Orientalism’s self-perpetuating capacities, my
contention here is a different if perhaps, in its own way, an equally provocative
one: that Orientalism (the book) has often been approached via Orientalism (the
method); and that a side-effect of Orientalism (the method) is a paradoxical
tendency for the very books on which it depends to go critically unread. The
rest of this chapter goes some way towards explaining what might be at stake
in such a critical reading, beginning with Said’s own retrospective comments on
Orientalism and continuing with a brief look at how three gifted anti-Orientalist
critics – Aijaz Ahmad, Meyda Yeğenoğlu and David Cannadine – responded to
the book in such a startlingly pre-emptive fashion that it almost seemed as if its
contours must have been known to them before it was actually read.
In the preface to Beginnings (1975), Said distinguishes between ‘beginnings’
and ‘origins’. ‘[T]he latter’, he says, are ‘divine, mythical and privileged’, while
‘the former [are] secular, humanly produced and ceaselessly re-examined’ (xiii).
For Said, the idea of re-examination has inspired the recent revisionisms of
counter-memory and the archive, revitalizing such intellectual trends as ‘the
critique of domination [...] and the [re-evaluation] of suppressed history
(feminine, non-white, non-European, etc.)’ (xiii). Beginnings, suggests Said, are
renewals rather than repetitions or recurrences; beginning, in this sense, is
about the making or producing of differences: it is tantamount to beginning
again (xvii). For Said, a beginning can be understood in the double sense of an
intention and a critical intervention: critical consciousness, he argues, has facili-
tated ‘that constant re-experiencing of beginning and beginning-again whose
force is neither to give rise to authority nor to promote orthodoxy but to stimu-
late self-conscious and situated activity, activity with aims non-coercive and

199

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 199 11/3/08 09:20:56

 Literature, History, Memory

communal’ (xiv). In this part of the chapter, I want to gauge to what extent the
interventionist spirit of beginnings, and ‘beginnings-again’, stands behind Said’s
own responses to Orientalism, itself conceived by many, unreflectingly perhaps,
as a ‘foundational’ critical work (see, for example, Ashcroft et al.). I also want
to use Said’s notion of ‘critical consciousness’, elaborated in later works such
as The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) and Culture and Imperialism (1993),
to examine the argument he makes in his work for a certain kind of reading:
one that opens up to what he calls the ‘non-coercive and communal’ aims of
intellectual activity, and that is alert to the complicities and self-aggrandizing
tendencies of modern academic work.
Said’s first detailed response to Orientalism was in the influential 1985 essay
‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, an essay that itself gave rise to several critical recon-
siderations, some of them even more extreme than in the first instance, of the
place of cultural politics in Said’s collected work. For his part, Said is largely
content in the essay to repeat the central ideas behind Orientalism: that, writ
large, it charts a 4,000-year-old history of cultural relations between Europe
and Asia; that, more specifically, it refers to a scientific discipline that, emerging
in the early nineteenth century, specialized ‘in the study of various Oriental
cultures and traditions’; and that, ideologically, it legitimizes the circulation
of images and fantasies of the Orient designed, in large part, to confirm the
epistemic authority of the West (‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ 128). As he did in
the earlier book, Said acknowledges his own personal investment in Orientalism
as part of ‘current debates, conflicts and interpretations of the Arab-Islamic
world’ (‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ 129). However, Said goes further than he does
in Orientalism in conceding his own involvement, for as he admits, there is no
Archimedean point ‘outside’ the Orient from which the Orient, and the strategies
used to represent it, can be objectively understood (‘Orientalism Reconsidered’
129–30). Said’s confession, however, only heightens his affront that the Orient,
generally, and the Arab world, in particular, have all too often been constructed as
‘Europe’s silent Other’, frozen into place as the fixed objects of a self-privileging
Western gaze (130–31). Thus, while he initially acknowledges the wide variety
of instructive Western-academic responses he has received to Orientalism, he
then points out that many of his respondents have continued, possibly inadver-
tently, to drown out the voices of those on whose behalf they have appeared to
want to speak (127–28).
He stresses, however, that this dialogue of the deaf has developed on both
sides of the Oriental/Occidental divide, not only in certain sympathetic kinds
of Western anti-Orientalist criticism, but also in those anti-Western (Said calls
them ‘nativist’ or ‘fundamentalist’) readings that have chosen to misinterpret
Orientalism, from a position of ‘cultural insiderism’ (142), as an apology for Islam
or a wholesale condemnation of the iniquities of the West (132). Ironically, then,
Said sees his book as having become subject to an Orientalism of reception in
which the critics have often fallen into an alternative Orientalism, and the critics
of the critics have been unwilling or unable to engage the critics ‘in a genuine
intellectual exchange’ (132).

200

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 200 11/3/08 09:20:56

 (Not) Reading Orientalism

Here, as so often in his work, Said lets his impatience get the better of him,
launching into an all-out attack on the ‘programmatic ignorance’ of readers,
like Daniel Pipes, who are mere lackeys of US neo-imperialism or, like Bernard
Lewis, who are tacit apologists for Zionism, despite their hypocritical insis-
tence that their studies of the Orient, Arabs and Islam are not ‘political’ at
all (133–35). Better not to read at all, Said implies, than to read in this repre-
hensibly expedient fashion, exhibiting in the process a ‘sheer heedless anti-
intellectualism unrestrained or unencumbered by the slightest trace of critical
self-consciousness’ (133). It is worth noting here that Said tends not to attribute
‘critical self-consciousness’ to those who happen to disagree with him – to
those who have ‘read’ him but not read him, as it were, or to those who have
read him but either had the temerity to rebuff him or to filter his work in
such a way as only to see what they have expressly wanted to see. Said’s own
reading of his work oscillates, similarly, between the very form of political parti-
sanship he is so quick to deride in others and his cultivation of a ‘decentred’
critical consciousness based, unlike Orientalism, on ‘investigative, open models
of analysis’, and committed to ‘the dismantling of systems of domination’, like
Orientalism, that are ‘collectively maintained’ (141–43). The type of reading
Said favours, though does not necessarily practise himself, thus gestures not
only towards the possibility of new beginnings, but towards ‘nothing less than
the creation of new objects for a new kind of knowledge’ (129).
Two further attempts on Said’s part to begin Orientalism again – to take
a ‘dominating system of knowledge’ and prise it apart to create the condi-
tions for a ‘new kind of knowledge’ – should be mentioned here. These are
the afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism and the preface to the 2003
edition, one of the last pieces of writing Said completed before he died. In the
1995 afterword, Said carries on where he left off in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’.
Recognizing that Orientalism, ‘in almost a Borgesian way, has become several
different books’, Said sets out to account for nearly a decade of reception,
‘reading back into the book’ what his many appreciators and detractors have
said (Orientalism 330). As in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Said gives short shrift
to those who have seen the book as resolutely ‘anti-Western’ or as an unadul-
terated celebration of the collective Arab cause. ‘One scarcely knows what to
make’, Said complains, ‘of [such] caricatural permutations of a book that to
its author and in its arguments is explicitly anti-essentialist, radically sceptical
about all categorical designations such as Orient and Occident, and painstak-
ingly careful about not “defending” or even discussing the Orient and Islam’
(331; emphasis in original). Much of the argument of ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’
(and, indeed, Orientalism itself) is repeated: the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’ are
a ‘combination of the empirical and the imaginative’, and should in no way be
understood as corresponding to a stable ontological realm (331); Orientalism is
not ‘just the antiquarian study of oriental languages, societies, and peoples’, but
is an evolved ‘system of thought [that] approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic,
and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint’ (333);
Orientalism presupposes a non-Oriental reader insofar as ‘[t]he discourse of

201

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 201 11/3/08 09:20:57

 Literature, History, Memory

Orientalism, its internal consistency [sic] and rigorous procedures, were all
designed for readers and consumers in the metropolitan West’ (336). This
familiar roll-call is then followed by an equally familiar demolition of Bernard
Lewis, Said’s intellectual nemesis, whose ‘verbosity scarcely conceals both the
ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for
getting nearly everything wrong’ (343). Lewis and his followers, fumes Said,
specialize in the ‘elaborate confection of ideological half-truths [intended] to
mislead non-specialist readers’ (346), thereby reconfirming the very prejudices
his own book had been explicitly designed to contest. These are the arguments
one finds, again and again, in Orientalism: that routine misreadings and misin-
terpretations can have devastating consequences for those routinely misread
and misinterpreted; that erudition in the service of ignorance is another form
of ignorance; that reading itself may produce knowledge – as in knowledge of
the Orient – that confirms the authority of the knower without creating new
possibilities for understanding or extending the boundaries of the known.
As in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Said concedes a few points, namely the
‘scholarly and humanistic achievements’ (Orientalism 342) of at least some
Orientalist practitioners, or the tendency of Orientalism to confess its own
attraction to the works of writers, scholars and administrators who clearly
‘condescended to or [actively] disliked the Orientals they either [studied] or
[ruled]’ (336). In general, though, the 1995 afterword has a confirmatory ring
to it. This is corroborated by Said’s view that some of his later work – Culture
and Imperialism, for instance – was primarily an amplification of, rather than a
departure from, Orientalism’s governing ‘cultural’ theses: on the symbiotic link
between culture and empire; on the constitutive hybridity of cultures; and on
the continuing existence of Orientalism as a willed form of human activity – as
cultural work (349). But if Said himself was always more likely to revisit than
to revise Orientalism, he was also appreciative of others’ efforts to push their
readings of the text into libertarian initiatives of their own. As Said says proudly
in the afterword:

I intended my book as part of a pre-existing current of thought whose purpose

was to liberate intellectuals from the shackles of systems like Orientalism: I
wanted readers to make use of my work so that they might then produce
new studies of their own that would illuminate the historical experience of
Arabs and others in a generous, enabling mode. That certainly happened in
Europe, the United States, Australia, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean,
Ireland, Latin America, and parts of Africa. The invigorated study of Africanist
and Indological discourses, the analyses of subaltern history, the reconfigura-
tion of postcolonial anthropology, political science, art history, literary criti-
cism, musicology, in addition to the vast new developments in feminist and
minority discourses – to all these, I am pleased and flattered that Orientalism
made a difference. (340)

The updated 2003 preface re-issues the compliment, with an important

clarification. The clarification consists of an impassioned defence of humanism

202

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 202 11/3/08 09:20:57

 (Not) Reading Orientalism

and humanistic critique’s capacity to ‘open up [...] fields of struggle, to intro-

duce a longer sequence of thought and analysis [that might] replace the short
bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us in labels and
antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent collective identity rather than
understanding and intellectual exchange’ (Orientalism xvii). Said’s humanism,
itself the subject of sustained critique, is triumphantly reasserted here: not as
an excuse for nostalgic traditionalism, but rather as an instrument for ‘rational
interpretive analysis’ at a time when ‘patient and sceptical inquiry’ is needed
to counteract the perceived need for ‘instant action and reaction’, and equally
needed to retrieve a lost sense of ‘the density and interdependence of human
life’ in a world ‘often dehumanized in the extreme’ (xx, xxii). The contexts for
the preface – continuing violence in Israel/Palestine, fundamentalist dogma and
intolerance, the bellicose post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – reveal
a Said more concerned than ever with the crudely differentiating labels that
people pin on one another, and with the lack of a reasoned discourse that
might help them come to terms with repeating histories of conflict, as well as
to negotiate the fraught complexities of the modern globalized world. More
interesting, perhaps, is that these contexts also reveal a Said as insistent as ever
on the value of humanistic research and its symbiotic dependence on the ‘book
culture [...] and general principle of mind that once sustained humanism as a
historical discipline’ (xx). This culture, increasingly replaced by the ‘fragmented
knowledge[s] of the mass media and the internet’, Said now sees with more
than a hint of wistfulness as having ‘almost disappeared’ (xx). Reading reappears
here as a mantra for the type of patient interpretive analysis that is needed to
offset formulaic conceptions of ourselves and others, eventually allowing us
to ‘live together in far more interesting ways than an abridged or inauthentic
mode of understanding can allow’ (xxii). It is reading that best fosters the devel-
opment of the ‘decentred critical consciousness’ – but not any reading, rather
reading in what Said problematically, if characteristically, calls ‘the proper sense
of the word’ (xxii). Reading, in other words, of the kind that stimulates reflec-
tion, debate and rational argument, and that is informed by the sturdy moral
principles that reinforce the idea of history being made and remade by human
beings in a modern secular world (xxii). Whether this reading is so different
from the reading of many of the European Orientalists is a point, understand-
ably, on which Said is not too keen to linger. Sure enough, though, Said’s critics
have been alert to the apparent contradictions in his humanist philosophy; and
these contradictions are made apparent, explicitly or implicitly, in the three
readings below.
Probably the most notorious attack on Orientalism has been that of the South
Asian Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad, whose coruscating critiques of Said, Jameson
and a number of other leading Leftist intellectuals in his wide-ranging book
In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) left much of the academic world
wondering where, if such potential allies could be turned so effectively into
enemies, Ahmad himself might want to find his friends. In his chapter on Said,
Ahmad wastes little time in moving onto the offensive. While Ahmad expresses

203

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 203 11/3/08 09:20:57

 Literature, History, Memory

solidarity with Said’s anti-Zionism and ‘his beleaguered location in the midst of
imperial America’ (160), he disagrees strongly with his historical and theoretical
methods, which he sees as being riven by ‘ambivalences’ and ‘self-cancelling
procedures’, particularly in Orientalism but also in much of his later work (219).
Some of Ahmad’s criticisms – and there are many – are as follows: that Said’s
attempt to write a counter-history to the European literary tradition that might
be posed against, say, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) falls into the same elitist
humanism from which its inspiration is taken (163–64); that this ideal humanism
contradicts Said’s awareness of the complicity of European humanism in the
history of European colonialism, and thus runs the risk of turning Orientalism
not into a strategically counter-historical, but a fundamentally anti-historical
work (167); that Orientalism is methodologically muddled, ‘denouc[ing] with
Foucauldian vitriol what [it also) loves with Auerbachian passion’, and ‘alternately
debunking and praising to the skies and again debunking the same [canonical
European] book[s], as if he had [somehow] been betrayed by the objects of
his passion’ (168); that it duplicates the tactics of Orientalism (the method)
by refusing to take on board the numerous ways in which non-Western intel-
lectuals have responded to, resisted or refuted the dominant representations
of the Orient in the West (172); that Orientalism (the book) remains confused as
to whether Orientalism (the method) is a historical by-product of colonialism
or whether it is a constitutive element of ‘the European imagination’, from
the Greeks to the present day (181); that it is equally confused about whether
Orientalism is an interlocking set of discursive representations or an accumu-
lated record of misrepresentations in the narrowly realist sense (185–86); and
that it goes so far as to make a virtue out of these and other conspicuous
inconsistencies, raising contradiction to the level of a method, and providing
the rationale for ‘saying entirely contrary things in the same text, appealing to
different audiences simultaneously but with the effect that each main statement
cancels out the other’ (175).
Ahmad scores a number of palpable hits here. However, much like Said, he
has a tendency to let his eloquence get the better of him, and in the chapter he
proves singularly adept at matching his opponent’s sweeping generalizations
with several of his own. Hence we find statements, attributed astonishingly
to Said, of the order that ‘all European knowledges of non-Europe are bad
knowledges because they are already contaminated with [Orientalism’s] aggres-
sive Identity-formation’; or, on the same page, that ‘Europeans [are] ontologi-
cally incapable of producing any true knowledge about non-Europe’ (178). One
hardly knows which book Ahmad is referring to here; surely not Orientalism.
Why this passionate denunciation of a book Ahmad submits to the closest of
close readings yet seems, at other times, not to have read at all? Said’s anti-
Marxism – predictably – turns out to be at the root of Ahmad’s problem, with
the latter not being frightened to nail his colours to the mast. These are very
red. Orientalism’s success, Ahmad sourly suggests, was unsurprising given the
prevailing neo-conservative political climate in which the ‘manifestly reactionary
anti-humanisms’ (192) of Foucault, Derrida and others were ­intellectually in the

204

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 204 11/3/08 09:20:57

 (Not) Reading Orientalism

ascendancy, as was the type of crudely essentialist identity politics that blithely
divided the world into ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ literatures, globally
‘dominant’ and historically ‘marginalized’ societies and cultural groups. This
caricatural portrait of Western academic politics in the late 1970s and on into
the 1980s might have gained from some of the historicist insight that Ahmad
accuses Said of lacking; similarly, one of the main charges he levels at Said –
the essentialist assumption of an ontological division between the ‘West’ and
the ‘Orient’, between ‘colonizing’ and ‘colonized’ societies and cultures – is
arguably replicated in his own embattled rhetoric and his appropriation of a
spokesperson’s role for a victimized ‘non-West’.
What is interesting about Ahmad’s attack is neither the level of its ferocity
nor the carelessness of his reading of Orientalism and selected others of Said’s
works. What is interesting about it, I would suggest, are the characteristics
it shares with Orientalism: the weakness for polemic, usually transferred onto
another authoritative body; the muscular use of eloquence and erudition to
outflank an opponent whose views are so clearly misbegotten or misguided
as to invite attack; and, not least, the Battle of the Books that such a use of
eloquence and erudition fosters, with intellectual tilting at intellectual on the
basis of historical and theoretical understandings derived from what they have,
or haven’t, ‘properly’ read.
This tendency to ‘out-Orientalize’ Orientalism is also apparent in feminist
critiques of Said’s study, at least some of which reinforce the type of binary
thinking they hastily accuse Said of practising, but which they see their work
(looking right past the considerable deconstructive activity in Said’s own text)
as seeking to dismantle and disrupt. The example I have picked out here is
the Turkish sociologist Meyda Yeğenoğlu’s book-length study Colonial Fantasies
(1998), which advertises itself in its subtitle as working ‘toward a feminist
reading of Orientalism’ (the method, though, as is soon made clear, this method
is closely tied in with the workings of Said’s eponymous text). Colonial Fantasies,
it has to be said, is a good step forward from several earlier feminist approaches
to Orientalism that either falsely assumed the gender-blindness of Said’s methods
or prematurely judged him to have joined the massed ranks of the Orientalists,
thereby reinforcing the male gender specificity of Orientalism and giving the
impression that all Orientalists, to paraphrase Wordsworth, are men speaking
to other men (see, for example, Emberley and Lewis). Like most of these earlier
critics, Yeğenoğlu believes that there is a connection between the production
of cultural and gender differences in Orientalism, and that representations
of the Oriental other require an understanding of the unconscious nature of
Western male fantasies and desires. The Orient, she suggests, is ‘a fantasy based
upon sexual difference’ (11): a difference, however, that has frequently been
unaccounted for or strategically effaced. She falls short, however, of accusing
Said himself of conspiring in this effacement; after all, he readily acknowledges
in Orientalism that ‘Orientalism [has often been] an exclusively male province;
like so many professional guilds during the modern period, it [has] viewed itself
and its subject matter with sexist blinders’ (Orientalism 207). What she objects

205

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 205 11/3/08 09:20:57

 Literature, History, Memory

to is Said’s suggestion that the Orient as sexualized site is not ‘the province of
[his own] analysis’ (Orientalism 188); as if what he calls, after Freud, the ‘latent’
(sexual) and ‘manifest’ (cultural) constructions of the Oriental other could
somehow be separated out (Orientalism 206). This is a reasonable objection; for
as Yeğenoğlu convincingly argues, sexual fantasy and the production of sexual
difference are constitutive of Orientalism, as is the link between (imagined)
knowledge of the Orient and (unconscious) sexual desire. Less convincing is
her insistence that ‘the Western subject’s desire for its Oriental other is always
mediated by a desire to have access to the space of its women, to the body
of its women and to the truth of its women’ (Yeğenoğlu 62–73). While she
is surely right that ‘[t]he process of Orientalization of the Orient is one that
intermingles with its feminization’ (73), her insistence that the Orient is always
mediated through the feminine clearly overstates the issue while recoding the
process of Orientalization in what appear to be exclusively heterosexual terms.
Equally questionable is her assertion of the dualistic nature of Said’s approach
to Orientalism: ‘latent’ versus ‘manifest’ Orientalisms; ‘synchronic’ versus
‘diachronic’ Orientalisms; ‘scholarly’ versus ‘sensual’ Orientalisms; and so on.
These are binary categories that Said admittedly deploys, but also repeatedly
interrogates and challenges, in Orientalism; like several other poststructurally
oriented analyses of Orientalism, Yeğenoğlu’s seems reluctant to acknowledge
the deconstructive activity already at work within the text. Yeğenoğlu’s book
certainly reveals her, in the main, to be a careful reader and reviser of Orientalism,
but at the risk of withholding a similar status to Said himself as a reader and
reviser of his own text.
My last example, the British historian David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism
(2001), occupies a rather different status, since it is a book that grudgingly
acknowledges Said’s work before proceeding studiously to ignore it, despite
the existence of Orientalism as a kind of ghostly marker or invisible referent
hovering behind the title of the text. Ornamentalism is less a response to than
a departure from Orientalism, leaving the ‘postcolonial approach’ to Empire
inspired by Said, among others, trailing vainly in its wake (Cannadine xv–xvi).
Like several other contemporary historians of Empire, Cannadine has little time
for ‘postcolonial’ and/or ‘anti-Orientalist’ critics, to the extent that he usually
conflates them to dismiss them: on the grounds not so much, as some of these
historians think (see, for example, Dewey and MacKenzie), that they often do
bad history, but rather because they are unhealthily fixated by the idea of the
superiority of the white European ‘race’. Cannadine admits – how could he not?
– that race played a factor in how the British saw their empire, but just as big
a factor, and an undervalued one, was the perception of rank and social status:
‘[T]he hierarchical principle that underlay Britons’ perceptions of their empire’,
argues Cannadine, ‘was not exclusively based on the collective, colour-coded
ranking of social groups, but depended as much on the more venerable colour-
blind ranking of individual social prestige. This means that there were at least
two visions of empire that were essentially (and elaborately) hierarchical: one
centred on colour, the other on class’ (9). What this means, more provocatively

206

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 206 11/3/08 09:20:57

 (Not) Reading Orientalism

put, is that ‘we [...] need to recognize that there were other ways of seeing the
empire than in the oversimplified categories of black and white with which we
are preoccupied. It is time we reoriented orientalism’ (125). It is uncertain who
is to be included in Cannadine’s ‘we’, and who it is, exactly, who is so preoc-
cupied with ‘the oversimplified categories of black and white’. But Said and his
followers are certainly among those on Cannadine’s mind, as he also suggests in
the following early rejoinder: ‘[T]he British Empire was not exclusively (or even
preponderantly) concerned with the creation of “otherness” on the presump-
tion that the imperial periphery was different from, and inferior to, the imperial
metropolis: it was at least as much (perhaps more?) concerned with formal
“construction of affinities” [operating] on the presumption that society on the
periphery was the same as, or even on occasions superior to, society in the
metropolis’ (xix).
Cannadine’s suggestion for the reorientation of Orientalism is ‘ornamen-
talism’, by which he understands the grand display by which the British Empire
made ‘visible, immanent and actual’ the hierarchical values for which it collec-
tively stood (122). It does occur to Cannadine that this might be as large an order
of generalization as that which he accuses Said and his ilk of perpetrating; as
he contentiously suggests, however, ‘the theory and practice of social hierarchy
[in the colonies] served to eradicate the differences, and to homogenize the
heterogeneities, of empire’, to the extent that a little understood aspect of the
British civilizing mission was the attempt to create other versions of the intri-
cately layered structure of British society ‘back home’ (8–10).
I am less concerned here with the validity of Cannadine’s argument (although
my tone immediately gives me away as being sceptical) than I am with the ways
in which Orientalism is being read, or rather not read, into the fabric of his text.
The most obvious thing to say here is that Orientalism and the postcolonial
criticism with which it is associated are largely treated as straw categories.
Cannadine, it appears, is a historian in a hurry – so much of a hurry, in fact,
that he feels no need to define or elaborate on entire categories of analysis
(Orientalism, postcolonialism) that he summarily rejects. This is a pity, since
a closer look at Ornamentalism reveals doubtless unwanted affinities with the
duplicated ‘anti-Orientalist Orientalism’ for which Said and others have been
regularly attacked. Lofty generalizations are made with minimal historical or
sociological evidence; polemic is substituted for analysis; an anti-elitist argument
is assembled, but by using an elitist approach. A phrase of Aijaz Ahmad’s, used
against Said, might equally be turned against Cannadine: ‘It sometimes appears
that one is transfixed by the power of the very voice that one debunks’ (Ahmad
173). Certainly, Cannadine seems at times to be almost nostalgic for the empire
his class analysis skewers, as in passages such as the following:
The head of the Commonwealth and the divisible sovereign is no longer the
iconic king-emperor of old, a symbol of unity and order and subordination;
and while the advent of air travel has made [royal] visits more easy and more
frequent, familiarity has also served to undermine their mystery and magic.

207

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 207 11/3/08 09:20:57

 Literature, History, Memory

The six-month voyages in British battleships, the transcontinental journeys

in splendid trains, the massed throngs of eager and expectant crowds, the
obsequious behaviour of colonial princes and premiers, the hushed and
reverent tones of journalists and authors: all this has long since gone, and
along with it the very notion that the monarch was the supreme embodiment
of imperial unity and hierarchy. (169–70)

The jury remains out on whether Orientalism is one of the landmark works
of the contemporary era or whether its flaws condemn it to secondary status;
whether it will be remembered fondly for catalysing critical debates across a
large number of different academic disciplines or, more grudgingly, as a deeply
contradictory work that hardly merits the attention it nonetheless continues to
receive. Whatever the case, it seems likely that Orientalism will continue to be at
the centre of lively debates on self-authorizing Western scholarship, the politics
of cross-cultural representation, the connection between cultural production
and imperial power, and the privileges that accrue to ‘race’. No doubt, it will still
be seen in some quarters as a continuation, rather than a critique, of the concep-
tual legacies of Orientalism, while as I have suggested here, readings will still be
produced that themselves replicate these ‘Orientalizing’ strategies, often in the
name of libertarian scholarship and anti-authoritarian critique. Orientalism, in
short, will continue to be read: meticulously, selectively, sometimes carelessly.
Sometimes, I suspect, it may well be referenced by those who have not read
it at all. Perhaps that is the fate of books that acquire what Said might have
described as their own ‘imaginative geography’, and that, far exceeding the
boundaries within which they were originally designated, have the uncanny
capacity to generate any number of simulacral copies of themselves. Take it or
leave it, read it or not, Orientalism is such a book. Oscar Wilde once famously
said that there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is
not being talked about. Said seems unlikely to suffer the latter fate, even if it
sometimes seems as if his work has been all the more enthusiastically talked
about the less it has been comprehensively read.

Works Cited

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice
in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.
Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Penguin,
2002.
Clifford, James. ‘On Orientalism’. In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. 255–76.
Dewey, Clive. ‘How the Raj Played Kim’s Game’. Times Literary Supplement 7 April 1998:
9–10.
Emberley, Julia. Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women’s Writing, Postcolonial
Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.
Gates, Henry Louis. ‘Critical Fanonism’. Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 457–70.

208

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 208 11/3/08 09:20:57

 (Not) Reading Orientalism

Lewis, Reina. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation. London: Routledge,
1996.
Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991.
MacKenzie, J. M. Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1995.
Miller, Christopher. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1985.
Prakash, Gyan. ‘Orientalism Now’. History and Theory (1995): n.p. (online offprint).
Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press,
1985.
——. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
——. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 2003.
——. ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’. In Postcolonial Criticism. Ed. B. Moore-Gilbert, G. Stanton
and W. Maley. London: Longman, 1997. 126–44.
——. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Viswanathan, Gauri, ed. Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said. London:
Bloomsbury, 2004.
Yeğenoğlu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Toward a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.

209

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:46:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Huggan_Main2.indd 209 11/3/08 09:20:57