Lunchtime Seminar: Nov 10th Tuesday, 12-1pm, William Smith, WS 0.06.

University of Lisbon, Centre for English Studies

Re-Orientalism: Interdisciplinary Approaches Dr Ana Cristina Mendes and Dr Lisa Lau

LISA LAU (2009). ‘Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of

Orientalism by Orientals.’ Modern Asian Studies, 43: 571-590.

LAU and MENDES (2011). Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within. London: Routledge.

LAU and MENDES (2012-2013). ‘Authorities of Representation: Speaking To and Speaking For. A Response to Barbara Korte.’ Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, 22.1: 137-143.

MENDES and LAU (2015). ‘India through re-Orientalist Lenses: Vicarious Indulgence and Vicarious Redemption,’ Interventions 17, 5: 706-727.

LAU and MENDES (2016 – expected). ‘Confrontational and Conciliatory: Ambiguous Positionalities in Mohsin Hamid’s and Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist,’ The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (pending revisions).

From Orientalism to Re-Orientalism: the genealogy and development of a concept

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978)

Knowledge = Power/Domination For the colonial regime to have knowledge about a colonised people is to dominate it, to have authority over it. Orientalism as a mode of discourse (drawing from Foucault) for representing ‘the Other’ : ‘a style of thought based on an ontological and

epistemological distinction between “the Orient” and … “the Occident”’ (undergirding this is ‘the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority’)

‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient- dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it; in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.’

Said’s methodological approach

Analysis of how diverse texts (political tracts, journalistic stories, travel books, religious books, scholarly works, poetry, and novels) presented colonised societies to their readers;

Examination of style, figures of speech, setting and other narrative devices (e.g., binary opposites).

Said called this an analysis of the

text’s surface or exteriority, as opposed to an analysis of what lies hidden in the text.

First-edition cover of Orientalism (1978)

‘The Imagined Orient’

‘Another important function, then, of the picturesque – Orientalizing in this case – is to certify that the people encapsulated by it, defined by its presence, are irredeemably different from, more backward than, and culturally inferior to those who construct and consume the picturesque product. They are irrevocably “Other”’. (Linda Nochlin 1989: 51)

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, ca.1870

Coherent set of narratives created by the West, creating and authorising knowledge of the East;

East-West binaries; viewing the East through western lenses, as undeveloped, static, sensual and passive;

Europe=Universal, West as reference point and Centre, peripheralisation of the Orient, relational identity and alter-egos;

Language as fundamental site of struggle;

Colonisation of the mind.

Orientalism as a school of thought

‘If postcolonial studies is to survive in any meaningful

way, it needs to absorb itself far more deeply with the contemporary world, and with the local circumstances within which colonial institutions and ideas are being moulded into the disparate cultural and socioeconomic practices which define our contemporary “globality”’.

(Loomba 1998: 256-257)

Researching and rethinking South Asia: from Orientalism to re-Orientalism

India’s global repositioning and cultural upheavals

in new economic climate; representation of Orient by Orientals, India by Indians;

Leading to Re-Orientalism: the perpetrating of Orientalism(s) by Orientals;

Re-Orientalism sets up alternative meta-narratives, simultaneously deconstructing but reinforcing orientalisms.

From Orientalism to Re-Orientalism: the genealogy of a concept

Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2015, 17: 5, 706-727.

Re-routing of Orientalist discourses;

Negotiation of contemporary Indian self-identity;

Representation of India through fiction (novels and film).

"India Through Re-Orientalist Lenses: Vicarious Indulgence and Vicarious Redemption"

Case studied Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, India

Sinha’s Animal’s People and Kavery Nambisan’s The Story That Must Not be Told.

Representation in the hands of a few elite ‘orientals,’ often Western-trained.

Increased polarisation within India of the orbits of powerful and powerless, but a crucial relationship nevertheless, of sustained victimising and exploitation.

Dark India through literary texts

Inverting ‘India Shining’, focusing on slum, poverty, degradation, depravation, crime, violence;

Indulgence in poverty: voyeuristic, pornographic, touristic; poorism/poverty tourism; poverty commodified;

Uncompromisingly bleak, stark language/depictions, vulgarities, abrasive;

Tone: knowing, mocking and self-mocking, subversive;

Serving up surfeit of exotic and Dark India material as demanded by Western market – punishing the targeted reader for desiring such material?

Dark India: Strategy of Re-Orientalism

Cinematic narratives revisit British India and the

struggle for independence, finding a way of talking about the past without humiliation (vicarious redemption);

BHF had and has a role in constructing Indian identity; cultural, social, national. Audience: within India as well as diasporic Indians;

Valuing of martyrdom and memory; conflating history and folklore (The Rising), hybrid of fact and fiction.

Bollywood Heritage Film

‘a relatively small group of “British” costume

dramas of the 1980s and early 1990s that detailed aspects of the English past and that shared various circumstantial, formal, and thematic characteristics, [in particular] an emphasis on the upper and middle classes in the early decades of the twentieth century’

[films that] ‘engage in one way or another with English heritage, [that is, films which] offer some version of the English past, or some representation of the history of Englishness or the English cultural heritage.’

(Higson 2003: 11-25)

British Heritage film

Cinematic narratives which revisit British India and

the struggle for independence

Postimperial memory industry, after Paul Gilroy’s postimperial, postcolonial melancholia (2005)

Representation of the Raj in British film

Richard Attenborough and Ben Kingsley with the Academy Awards awarded for Gandhi (1982)

The ‘Raj revival’

‘… western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes; or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah; or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect.’

Rushdie, Salman. “A Fine Pickle.” The Guardian 28 Feb. 2009.

Merchant-Ivory’s Heat and Dust

(1983)

‘western movies about India were

about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes’

David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984)

‘… or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah’

The Jewel in the Crown (1984)

‘… or they were about European

women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah’

Reversal of the Gaze: no longer experiences of British in India, but experiences of Indians in British India.

More coherent narrative about India’s self-identity

Redemption of British colonialists, redeeming British characters who facilitated the endeavour of Indian freedom-fighters

BHF starring glamorised Indian freedom fighters and fair minded British individuals, symbiotic relationship

Historical revisionism and BHF (post 2000)

‘Hindi cinema’s old preoccupations: to do with

forgetting and remembering one’s place in the world, and, connected to this, to do with the theme of doubles, of being joined, whether one knows it or not, to a different, often contradictory, version of one’s self and life’

(Chaudhuri 2008: 172)

Hindi cinema and historical revisionism (post 2000)

Seeking to evade Western hegemony, without any

hope of entirely escaping it

Orientalist representation of India as exotic, exciting, seductive, mysterious, Other: Re-Orientalism recasting of India as colonised nation struggling with poverty, myriad oppressions, exploitation

Both sets of representations are as per Western imagination, fitting into Western narrative of Global South vs Global North, well received by and in the West.

Through novel and film

1) Peddling of poverty, and mockingly, subversively, as assertion of agency, or at least a degree of agency, but still with reference to Western demand, reinforcing Western centrality 2) Reconciliation of traumatic past, scripting whiteness redeemed, expiating guilt, providing recognition of imperial atrocities committed, reversing the gaze, creating ‘global media contraflow’ as opposed to vertical culture flow. Re-Orientalism leading to new cartographies of power and

authority East engages West in increasingly self-aware, multi-layered

ways, constantly renegotiating positions of power and influence.

Conclusion: Re-Orientalist strategies