Introducing Re-Orientalism: A New Manifestation of Orientalism

Abstract

According to Edward Said’s Foucauldian take on imperial discourse, the cultural construct of Orientalism was the European imperialistic strategy of composing a positive image of the western Self while casting the ‘East’ as its negative alter ego, alluring and exotic, dangerous and mysterious, always the Other. As such, ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’ (Said 2003: 1-2), emerging as an intricate part of western culture itself and as a way to face internal contradictions. Self-evidently, Orientalism still persists in both popular and institutional constructions of culture and identity, but has developed in a rather curious trajectory over the last few decades. One direction of particular interest has been identified and designated as ‘re-Orientalism’ (Lau 2009), where ‘Orientals’ are seen to be perpetrating Orientalisms no less than ‘non-Orientals’ and, moreover, perpetrating certain and selected types of Orientalisms. Where Said’s Orientalism is grounded in how the West constructs the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’, re-Orientalism is based on how cultural producers with eastern affiliations come to terms with an orientalized East, whether by complying with perceived expectations of western readers, by playing (along) with them or by discarding them altogether. As a consequence, the present critical project aims to situate itself within the reconfiguration of modes of cultural analysis that observe, identify and comment the operations of new Orientalisms in the twenty-first century. Re-Orientalist discursive practices and rhetorical strategies are often sites of subversion where meanings are in constant flux. In this sense, re-Orientalism theory exposes the power of Orientalist discourse while underscoring its instability and mutability, and as such provides avenues for questioning the endurance of Orientalist practices today. One purpose of this collection is to observe how re-Orientalism is deployed, made to circulate, and perceived by cultural producers and consumers within the specific context of South Asian identity politics.