Orientalism - autonomous learning

348 ORIENTALISM
the most basic conditions of civilized life had broken down," and to
do this by means of a system of imposed trusteeships. His model is
explicitly a nineteenth century colonial one where, he says, in order
for the Europeans to trade profitably they had to impose political
order.
Johnson's argument has numerous subterranean echoes in the
works of U.S. policy-makers, the media, and of course U.S. foreign
policy itself, which remains interventionist in the Middle East, Latin
America, and Eastern Europe, and frankly missionary everywhere
else, especially with regard to its policies toward Russia and the
former Soviet republics. The important point, however, is that a
largely unexamined but serious rift has opened in the public consciousness
between the old ideas ofWestern hegemony (of which the
system of Orientalism was a part) on the one hand, and newer ideas
that have taken hold among subaltern and disadvantaged communities
and among a wide sector of intellectuals, academics, and artists,
on the other. It is now very strikingly no longer the case that the lesser
peoples-formerly colonized, enslaved, suppressed-are silent or
unaccounted for except by senior European or American males.
There has been a revolution in the consciousness of women, minorities,
and marginals so powerful as to affect mainstream thinking
worldwide. Although I had some sense of it when I was working on
Orientalism in the 1970s, it is now so dramatically apparent as to
demand the attention ofeveryone seriously concerned with the scholarly
and theoretical study of culture.
Two broad currents can be distinguished: post-colonialism and
post-modernism, both in their use of the word "post" suggesting not
so much the sense of going beyond but rather, as Ella Shohat puts it
in a seminal article on the post-colonial, suggesting "continuities and
discontinuities, but its emphasis is on the new modes and forms of the
old colonialist practices, not on a 'beyond'."7 Both post-colonialism
and post-modernism emerged as related topics of engagement and
investigation during the 1980s and, in many instances, seemed to take
account of such works as Orientalism as antecedents. It would be
impossible here to get into the immense terminological debates that
surround both words, some of them dwelling at length on whether
the phrases should or should not be hyphenated. The point here is
therefore not to talk about isolated instances of excess or risible
jargon, but to locate those currents and efforts which, from the
perspective of a book published in 1978, seem to some extent now to
involve it in 1994.
Afterword 349
Much of the most compelling work on the new political and economic
order has concerned what, in a recent article, Harry Magdoff
has described as "globalization," a system by which a small financial
elite expanded its power over the whole globe, inflating commodity
and service prices, redistributing wealth from lower income sectors
(usually in the non-Western world) to the higher-income ones. S
Along with this, as discussed in astringent terms by Masao Miyoshi
and Arif Dirlik, there has emerged a new transnational order in
which states no longer have borders, labor and income are subject
only to global managers, and colonialism has reappeared in the
subservience of the South to the North. 9 Both Miyoshi and Dirlik go
on to show how the interest of Western academics in subjects such as
multiculturalism and "post-coloniality" can in fact be a cultural and
intellectual retreat from the new realities of global power: "What we
need," Miyoshi says, "is a rigorous political and economic scrutiny
rather than a gesture of pedagogic expediency," exemplified by the
"liberal self-deception" contained in such new fields as cultural studies
and multiculturalism (751).
But even if we take such injunctions seriously (as we must), there
is a solid basis in historical experience for the appearance today of
interest in both post-modernism and its quite different counterpart
post-colonialism. There is first of all the much greater Eurocentric
bias in the former, and a preponderance of theoretical and aesthetic
emphasis stressing the local and the contingent, as well as the almost
decorative weightlessness of history, pastiche, and above all consumerism.
The earliest studies of the post-colonial were by such distinguished
thinkers as Anwar Abdel Malek, Samir Amin, and C. L. R.
J ames, almost all based on studies of domination and control done
from the standpoint of either a completed political independence or
an incomplete liberationist project. Yet whereas post-modernism in
one of its most famous programmatic statements (Jean-Franyois
Lyotard's) stresses the disappearance of the grand narratives of
emancipation and enlightenment, the emphasis behind much of the
work done by the first generation of post-colonial artists and scholars
is exactly the opposite: the grand narratives remain, even though
their implementation and realization are at present in abeyance, deferred,
or circumvented. This crucial difference between the urgent
historical and political imperatives of post-colonialism and postmodernism's
relative detachment makes for altogether different approaches
and results, although some overlap between them (in the
technique of "magical realism," for example) does exist.