Orientalism - autonomous learning

350 ORIENTALISM
I think it would be wrong to suggest that in much of the best
post-colonial work that has proliferated so dramatically since the
early 1980s there hasn't been a great emphasis on the local, regional,
and contingent: there has, but it seems to me to be most interestingly
connected in its general approach to a universal set of concerns,
all of them having to do with emancipation, revisionist attitudes
toward history. and culture, and a widespread use of recurring theoretical
models and styles. A leading motif has been the consistent
critique of Eurocentrism and patriarchy. Across U.S. and European
campuses in the 1980s students and faculty alike worked assiduously
to expand the academic focus of so-called core curricula to include
writing by women, non-European artists and thinkers, and subalterns.
This was accompanied by important changes in the approach
to area studies, long in the hands of classical Orientalists and their
equivalents. Anthropology, political science, literature, sociology,
and above all history felt the effects of a wide-ranging critique of
sources, the introduction of theory, and the dislodgement of the
Eurocentric perspective. Perhaps the most brilliant revisionist work
was done not in Middle East Studies, but in the field oflndology with
the advent of Subaltern Studies, a group of remarkable scholars
researchers led by Ranajit Guha. Their aim was nothing less than a
revolution in historiography, their immediate goal being to rescue the
writing of Indian history from the domination of the nationalist elite
and restore to it the important role of the urban poor and the rural
masses. I think it would be wrong to say of such mostly academic
work only that it was easily co-optable and complicit with "transnational"
neo-colonialism. We need to record and acknowledge the
achievement while warning of the later
What has been of special interest for me has been the extension of
post-colonial concerns to the problems of geography. Mter all, Orientalism
is a study based on the re-thinking of what had for centuries
been believed to be an unbridgeable chasm separating East from
West. My aim, as I said was not so much to dissipate difference
itself-for who can deny the constitutive role of national as well
as cultural differences in the relations between human beings-but to
challenge the notion that difference implies hostility, a frozen reified
set of opposed essences, and a whole adversarial knowledge built out
of those things. What I called for in Orientalism was a new way of
conceiving the separations and conflicts that had stimulated generations
of hostility, war, and imperial control. And indeed, one of the
most interesting developments in post-colonial studies was a re-read-
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ing of the canonical cultural works, not to demote or somehow dish
dirt on them, but to re-investigate some of their assumptions, going
beyond the stifling hold on them of some version of the master-slave
binary dialectic. This has certainly been the comparable effect of
astoundingly resourceful novels such as Rusdie's Midnight's Children,
the narratives ofe. L. R. James, the poetry ofAimi: cesaire and
of Derek Walcott, works whose daring new formal achievements are
in effect a re-appropriation of the historical experience of colonialism,
revitalized and transformed into a new aesthetic of sharing and
often transcendent re-formulation.
One sees it also in the work of the group of distinguished Irish
writers who in 1980 established themselves as a collective called Field
Day. The preface to a collection of their works says about them:
believed that Field Day could and should contribute to
the solution of the present crisis by producing analyses of the established
opinion, myths and stereotypes which had become both a symptom
and cause of the current situation [between Ireland and the
The collapse of constitutional and political arrangements and
the recrudescence of the violence which they had been designed to
repress or contain made this a more urgent requirement in the North
than in the Republic .... The company, therefore, decided to embark
upon a succession of publications, starting with a series of pamphlets
[in addition to an impressive series of poems by Seamus Heaney, essays
by Seamus Deane, plays by Brian Friel and Tom Paulin] in which the
nature of the Irish problem could be explored and, as a result, morc
successfully confronted than it had been hitherto.'o
The idea of rethinking and re-formulating historical experiences
which had once been based on the geographical separation of peoples
and cultures is at the heart of a whole spate of scholarly and critical
works. It is to be found, to mention only three, in Ammiel Alcalay's
After Arabs and Jews: Remaking Levantine Culture, Paul Gilroy's
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, and Moira
Ferguson's Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial
Slavery, 1670-.1834. 11 In these works, domains once believed to have
been exclusive to one people, gender, race, or class are re-examined
and shown to have involved others. For long represented as a battleground
between Arabs and Jews, the Levant emerges in Alcalay's
book as a Mediterranean culture common to both peoples; according
to Gilroy a similar process alters, indeed doubles, our perception of
the Atlantic Ocean, hitherto thought of as principally a European