Showing papers on "Orientalism published in 1999"

Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and "The Mystic East"

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction - Changing the Subject 1. The Power of Definitions: A Genealogy of the 'Mystical' 2. Disciplining Religion 3. Sacred Texts, Hermeneutics and World Religions 4. Orientalism and Indian Religions 5. The Modern Myth of 'Hinduism' 6. 'Mystic Hinduism': Vedanta and the Politics of Representation 7. Orientalism and the Discovery of 'Buddhism' 8. The Politics of Privatization Indian Religion and the Study of Mysticism 9. Beyond Orientalism? Religion and Comparativism in a Post-Colonial Era.

Anxious nation Australia and the rise of Asia. 1850-1939

Abstract: Informing many recent studies of the West's understanding of Asia, certainly since the publication in the late 1970s of Edward Said's immensely influential analysis of 'Orientalism', is the fascination with 'otherness'. What conditions produced 'Asianness' and what constituted 'Asia'? For much of the period covered in this study, a good deal of energy was invested in the task of establishing that Australia was neither Aboriginal nor Asian. Yet the business of creating a boundary which divided Australia from its 'other' created a heightened unease over invasion and violation. There was also a growing fear that the will to maintain distinctiveness might weaken to the point of collapse. Viewed in this light, Australia was simultaneously threatened with disappearance at the hands of aggressive outsiders and from decadent forces at work within the nation. This book explores some of the many points at which 'Asia' was introduced into speculations about Australia's future. It examines the cultural meanings that have attached to Asia through a formative period in our history and it documents a culturally rich, often contradictory, demonology of the 'East' along with an extensive and varied discourse on each of the major societies of the region; India, China and Japan and, to a lesser extent, what was once the Netherlands East Indies and is now Indonesia. It proposes that a range of Asia-related discourses, many of which sought to reveal the truth or essence of Asia, were disseminated through Australian society from the 1850s. It argues that from the late nineteenth century there was a growing belief that developments in Asia would have an increasing impact upon Australia. By the 1930s, despite the already familiar complaint that Australians knew too little of the outside world, there was, nonetheless, a sustained commentary on Asia-Pacific themes, not least the merits of forming closer political, economic and cultural ties with the region.

New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882

Abstract: From George Washington's desire (in the heat of the Revolutionary War) for a proper set of Chinese porcelains for afternoon tea, to the lives of Chinese-Irish couples in the 1830s, to the commercial success of Cheng and Eng (the "Siamese twins"), to rising fears of the "heathen Chinee", this work offers a look at the role Chinese people, things and ideas played in the fashioning of American culture and politics. Piecing together various historical fragments and ancedotes from the years before Chinatown emerged in the 1870s, historian John Kuo Wei Tchen redraws Manhattan's historical landscape and seeks to broaden our understanding of the role of port cultures in the making of American identities. Techen tells his story in three parts. In the first, he explores America's fascination with Asia as a source of luxury items, cultural taste and lucrative trade. In the second he explains how Chinese people and things become objects of curiosity in the expansive commercial marketplace. In the third part, Tchen focuses on how Americans' attitude toward the Chinese changed from fascination to demonization.

Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity

Abstract: Edward Said is one of the most important literary, political and cultural theorists of the contemporary world. But until now no one has attempted to assess and explain the significance of his journalism and scholarship in one accessible full-length volume. In this refreshingly clear and timely introduction to Said and his work, Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia set out the key tenets of his position and the context out of which his work emerges. Whilst acknowledging the crucial importance of his best-known and most paradigm shifting early work Orientalism , they unravel for the first time the vital part played in his writings by the concept of 'worldliness'. They also illuminate Said's subtle demonstration of the paradoxical nature of 'identity' in the post-colonial world. Edward Said is an extremely useful and enlightening introduction to a key figure for twenty-first-century thought.

Orientalism and the Modern Myth of "Hinduism"

Abstract: Is there really a single ancient religion designated by the catch-all term 'Hinduism' or is the term merely a fairly recent social construction of Western origin? This paper examines the role played by Orientalist scholars in the construction of Western notions of Indian religion by an examination of the origins of the concept of 'Hinduism'. It is argued that the notion of 'Hinduism' as a single world religion is a nineteenth century construction, largely dependent upon the Christian presuppositions of the early Western Orientalists. However, exclusive emphasis upon the role of Western Orientalists constitutes a failure to acknowledge the role played by key indigenous informants (mostly from the brāhmana castes) in the construction of modern notions of 'the Hindu religion'. To ignore the indigenous dimension of the invention of 'Hinduism' is to erase the colonial subject from history and perpetuate the myth of the passive Oriental. The paper concludes with a discussion of the accuracy and continual usefulness of the term 'Hinduism'.

The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha's Greece

Abstract: This text focuses on the tension between the two experiences of Ali Pasha - the diplomatic and the cultural. It places the history of Greece in the context of European history, as well as that of Ottoman decline, and demonstrates the ways in which contemporary European visions of Greece, particularly those generated by Romanicist philhellenism, contributed to a form of "orientalism" in the south Balkans. Greece, a territory never formally colonized by Western Europe, was subject instead to a surrogate form of colonial control, one in which the country's history and culture, rather than its actual land, was annexed, invaded and colonized.

Writing French Algeria

Abstract: Writing French Algeria is a groundbreaking study of the European literary discourse on French Algeria between the conquest of 1830 and the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. For the first time in English, this intertextual reading reveals the debate conducted within Algeria - and between colony and metropole - that aimed to forge an independent cultural identity for the European settlers. Through astute discussions of various texts, Peter Dunwoodie maps the representation of Algeria both in the dominant nineteenth-century discourse of Orientalism, via the litterature d'escale of writers such as Gautier or Fromentein, and in the colonial writing of Louis Bertrand, Robert Randau, and the `Algerianists' who played a critical role in the construction of the new `Algerian'. Dunwoodie shows how this ultimate construction relied on an extremely selective process which marginalized the indigenous people of the Maghreb in order to rediscover the country's `Latin' roots. The book also focuses on the dialogism operative in the works of Ecole d'Alger writers like Gabriel Audisio, Albert Camus, and Emmanuel Robles, interrogating the way in which their voices countered the closure of those earlier strategies and yet still articulated the unresolvable dilemma

In the Court of the Sultan: Orientalism, Nationalism, and Modernity in Philippine and Filipino American Dance

Abstract: Anderson’s insights 3 about the complex “mimicry” 4 of colonialism in post-colonial states seems to me to be increasingly relevant. For example, in his penetrating analysis of colonialism and nationalism in the Philippines, Michael Salman comments that “when Benedict Anderson’s work on the generalization of nationalism is put alongside Edward Said’s writings on the pervasiveness of colonial culture, it does suggest the outlines of a parallel transformation of consciousness, and its containment in conservative [End Page 251] ideology, neo-colonialism, and the repressive

Culture against history? the politics of east asian identity

Abstract: This essay examines changes in attitudes toward the question of cultural identity over the last three decades, with particular reference to the quest for an East Asian identity. The question of cultural identity is bound up with the history of EuroAmerican colonialism, which denied to other societies a historical presence of their own. The radical national liberation movements of the 1960s sought to overcome the opposition between “the past” and “the West” by resting their hopes on revolutionary struggles that would create new cultures in the process of the struggle out of present-day realities in which “the past” and “the West” were intertwined inextricably. By contrast, there has been a retreat in recent years into native “traditions,” which once again focus on this opposition. The retreat into traditionalism nourishes ethnic and national particularism. The essay proceeds to examine, albeit sketchily, the recent “Confucian revival” in East Asia, and the quest for East Asian or Asian values. It argues that these developments are part of a resurgence of ethnicity that has accompanied globalization, and in many ways are its products. It is the irony of contemporary anti-Eurocentric movements that they themselves are entrapped in the history and geography of Orientalism. In other words, the very effort to counteract Eurocentrism is bound by the categories of a Eurocentric Orientalism. This is further demonstrated by the fact that EuroAmerican theorists have played a crucial part in the articulation of Asian values in their most recent appearance. These have been problems all along, it suggests, in national as well as regional and continental self-definitions in Asia to the extent that Eurocentric assumptions have been internalized in Asian ideas of Asia and Europe. The essay offers a sketchy overview of the history of these ideas by way of illustrating this argument. One of the basic problems that the essay seeks to bring out is the relationship of various approaches to the question of Asian identity to political and social interests. While the Confucian revival and the quest for Asian values have attracted the greatest attention, it suggests, there have been other efforts to approach the question from the bottom up, not in terms of categories of nation, region, and continent, but in terms of the everyday lives of the people in Asia, in which “the past” and “the West” are ever copresent. These efforts, which could be described as efforts within Asian contexts at “globalization from below,” have a kinship with earlier national liberation efforts to overcome distinction of Europe and Asia, East and West, or modernity and tradition. They oppose the reification of cultures along inherited spatial or temporal categories, but insist instead on the historicity of cultures. History, employed not to reify culture

Imperialism & Orientalism : a documentary sourcebook

Abstract: Part I: From the Company to the Crown 1757-1857: 1. The Company. 2. Oriental Despotisms and Political Economies. 3. Orientalism. 4. Laws and Order. Part II: The Opening of the Suez Canal 1869: 5. The Gala Opening. 6. The Canal. 7. The Canal and its Consequences. 8. The Occupation of Egypt. Part III: The Great Game: 9. The Game: The Mutiny. 10. The Game: Afghan Wars. 11. The Game and Its Rules. 12. The Game Board. Part IV: The Scramble for Africa: 13. The Scramble. 14. The Mission and its Missionaries. 15. The Administrators: Lugard and Rhodes. 16. Crises of Empire Making. Part V: Victoria: 17. On Exhibit. 18. In the Streets. 19. Schoolboys and Scouts. 20. The Debate over Empire. 21. The Empress.

Queering Orientalism: the East as Closet in Said, Ackerley, and the Medieval Christian West

Abstract: The reinscription in Said's Orientalism of the divisions and silences of western Orientalist discourse is perhaps nowhere more problematic than in the area of gender, a subject on which Said's work has surprisingly little to say. Further, when Said discusses the work of "homosexual" authors, he keeps the open secret of hotnoeroticism safely in the closet. This essay proposes a queering of the construct of Orientalism, as it is set forth in Said's work and as it may be seen to function in instances of Orientalist performance where the figure of cross-dressing allows for complex negotiations between the West and an eroticized Eastern Other.

Theater and the rites of post-negritude remembering

Abstract: ����� ��� o judge from all the clamor in contemporary literary discourse, it would seem that we are back, we black writers, to the days of Negritude, and that the most acute subject of our writing is once again the rediscovery and reaffirmation of our cultural values, and the reinscription of our racial identity on the pages of history. The white man, to consolidate his military, territorial, and economic conquests over us, has inscribed us within a grand myth of Absence, according to which our lives were more or less a virtual tabula rasa before his arrival. And therefore, as the argument goes, all our work, like that of our Negritude predecessors, is assumed to be dedicated to the deconstruction of this racist myth, through the demonstration of the value and plenitude of our past, and the recovery of our autonomous identity. However—as someone from the so-called Third World, who lives and works in Ibadan, Nigeria—I find it curious, to say the least, that this debate about a so-called “war of Identity” has come to assume a position of such signal importance in discussions about Africa and the Asian world. Perhaps I should not complain; perhaps I should only be grateful that we feature at all in the debate, in a context where the arrogance of late capitalism—with its triumph over world socialism, and the subsequent end of the cold war; its visible material affluence, and the fashioning of such an astute economic arsenal as multinational companies (Shell, the World Bank, the IMF, the Club of Paris, etc.); its dominant control of the technology of communication and warfare; and so on—has proclaimed the “end of history.” A new theology, that of “market forces,” authorizes astounding philosophies and new epistemological systems that proclaim the irrationality of all causes and all beliefs, sing of the virtues of hybridity and difference, while in fact making the poor and the deprived of history more invisible. Against this threat of invisibility and anonymity, and fueled by Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism, the exiles from the Third World in Euro-America mount a fierce and courageous battle, indeed, to be heard, recognized, and respected, a battle in which the so-called “postcolonialist” discourse is the noisy battleground, and the erasure of identity the strident lament. It is a battle with which, naturally, I am in sympathy. But if I must con

The Re-Orientation of Buddhism in North America!

Abstract: This paper applies Edward Said's thesis on the ideology of 'orientalism' to an analysis of the transplantation of Buddhism in North America To do this, the article examines Martin Bauntann's recent model of transplantation as a strategic adaptation model for the transplantation of Buddhism to North America In addition to this, the paper looks at the ways, in which a reoriented North American Buddhism has inherited the latent notions of orientalism

Orientalism and Crusader Art: Constructing a New Caanon

Abstract: This article argues that we need to question the Orientalist ideology that draws boundaries between the study of crusader art and that of the neighboring Muslim states. Two unusual Ayyubid glass beakers, now in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, are shown to contain Christian images. These images are placed within a landscape showcasing the major monuments in Jerusalem: the Dome of the Rock, the Holy Sepulchre, and the Tower of David, to highlight the significance of the sites for the viewer/patron. When these two beakers are compared with rnetalwork made in an Islamic style but depicting Christian scenes, it becomes clear that they were not as rare as we may think. Indeed, they prompt us to rethink our preconsumptions about daily life in the crusader kingdoms and to reassess the workings of the multiethnic market spaces of the Levant. The beakers may have served a foreign clicntele, but most probably were made for local Christian communities. Furthermore, these pieces allow us to study the processes of transference of tastes and techniques to the West.

Morrison's Beloved: Allegorically Othering "White" Christianity

Abstract: "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine." --Song of Solomon (6:3) "I AM BELOVED and she is mine." --Toni Morrison, Beloved "... love is as strong as death; jealousy is as cruel as the grave; ... many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it" --Song of Solomon (8:6-7) At least three recent critical works recognize Toni Morrison's reference to and revision of Biblical passages in her 1987 novel Beloved.(1) To date, however, no one has mentioned the most developed of her Scriptural allusions, namely her revisionist narration involving Old Testament texts, especially the Song of Solomon. Although Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, drew upon a Biblical passage for the title to her 1977 novel Song of Solomon, she waited for ten years to develop, in Beloved, the deeper implications of a reference to Solomon's Song. Allusions to this most poignant and erotic passage of the Old Testament not only inform the relationships between Morrison's characters, but also contribute to her consideration of the relationship between black and white communities in the mid-nineteenth century United States. I will argue that Morrison's allegorical revision of the Song of Solomon and other Biblical passages constitutes what Stephen A. Barney, in Allegories of History, Allegories of Love, terms "other-speech," a type of minority discourse related to, but not symptomatic of, the dynamics of religious and/or cultural "othering." The dynamics of religious "othering," especially those which conflate Christianity and "the white man's burden," closely parallel and are often intertwined with what Edward Said terms "Orientalism," a process whereby powerful Western nations for centuries defined the terms of interaction with their African and Asian colonies, and even with other non-Western nations, as a Manichean struggle between light and dark, good and bad, enlightened self and irreconcilable "other." This "othering" process applies equally to relationships in the United States between dominant culture and those groups and individuals who have at various times been defined as other than the American ideal, an ideal historically characterized as WASP--white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.(2) As Said observes in Orientalism, "Since the White Man, like the Orientalist, lived very close to the line of tension keeping the coloreds at bay, he felt it incumbent on him readily to define and redefine the domain he surveyed" (228). In keeping with this dominating strategy, the white slaveholder "schoolteacher" in Morrison's Beloved instructs his nephews to study the black slaves on the ironically named Sweet Home plantation in order to catalog their "animal" and "human" characteristics. Moreover, he severely beats Sixo, a slave who dares to challenge the slaveholder's authority, not so much for stealing and eating a pig, but more "to show him that definitions belonged to the definers--not the defined" (190). From Sixo's treatment, we can see that the political power to use physical force with impunity against another person is inherently linked to the power to determine what individuals and groups get defined as "other" in the first place. Given Sixo's initial treatment and his ultimate death at the hands of the slaveholders, it would appear that the "other" is often, if not always, powerless in the face of those with the power to define; however, I will suggest that the very nature of "otherness," as the term applies to both groups and the discourse of alterity, bestows hidden powers in the form of "other-speech." The physical and psychological pain that forces marginalized persons to recognize themselves as "other," also provides entry into a minority discourse community.(3) Although minority discourse has historically been dismissed as irrelevant by those with the power to choose which narratives get published and circulated as authoritative, that very dismissal may allow an unpoliced space in which "other-speech" can develop relatively unchecked into what becomes--in effect--subversive language. …

Henry Corbin, 1903-1978: Between Philosophy and Orientalism

Abstract: Henry Corbin was a French engage Orientalist inspired by German philosophical phenomenology and existential theology. His scholarly work on Islamic philosophy and Iranian culture implies a fundamental critique of Orientalism, which reflects his philosophical background and differs in nature from Edward Said's, although the reactions to both were sometimes similar. The article attempts to highlight the connection between Corbin's philosophical thought and his prodigious scholarly work, and to assess the impact of the latter in light of the former.

The Floating World of Nouveau Chinoiserie: Asian Orientalist Productions of Greek Tragedy

Abstract: Criticism is increasingly being levelled at western directors who, in the name of a vague intercultural aesthetic, embark on experiments combining western texts with various kinds of oriental movement, costume, and music. In this article, Catherine Diamond raises the same issues in regard to productions of western drama in Asia, and offers a detailed analysis of three productions of ancient Greek tragedies to reveal how a new kind of non-specific orientalism has come to pervade the international stage, originating no less in Asia than in the West. Lavish productions, mounted to impress the international festival circuit rather than to engage local audiences, appropriate western tragedies primarily on account of their status in the western literary and theatrical canon; and rather than offering new interpretations of the texts from a different cultural perspective, they contribute to the creeping ascendancy of superficially exotic spectacle. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor, is currently a director with Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.

Reading Orientalism and the Crisis of Epistemology in the Novels of Lawrence Durrell

Abstract: In his article, "Reading Orientalism and the Crisis of Epistemology in the Novels of Lawrence Durrell," James Gifford argues that Edward Said's Orientalism has had a far reaching impact on the study of literature as well as in Comparative Literature, especially in works which depict the "Eastern Other." However, a question arises in those texts which have completed the philosophical motion from existentialism to epistemological skepticism such as the novels of Lawrence Durrell. For example, in The Avignon Quintet a provisional and even counterfactual form of knowledge becomes central and obvious to the reader. Subsequently, knowledge of the Other becomes deflated, and a poor means of defining. The Other -all that is not the Self -becomes universalized as the text reveals that (mis)perceptions of the Other are more of a reflection of the Self than they are a truthful depiction of any absolute reality. Acknowledgment of the artifice of art leads to a surrendering of the artist's power to communicate any body of knowledge. In Monsieur, Durrell's forceful realization of the fiction of his work, and constant dissolution of any knowledge it may be communicating is a potential confounding of the knowledge/power relationship in the East/West or Other/Self dialectic. As these theoretical elements serve an important role in Comparative Literature, a further redefining of them in general would be of value to their use in more specific circumstances. James Gifford, "Reading Orientalism and the Crisis of Epistemology in the Novels of Lawrence Durrell" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1.2 (1999):

Marianne Moore and China: Orientalism and a Writing of America

Abstract: Marianne Moore's poetry offers an extraordinarily rich site from which to analyse a tradition of American orientalism which focused upon China. Marianne Moore and China examines why she chose to participate in that tradition and analyses why her borrowing of Chinese models of all kinds - from poetry to painting and philosophy - was so critical to the formation of her verse. Moore's poetry is part of a long tradition of satirical critique in orientalist writing which finds its roots in English literature. In the early twentieth century, this tradition of critique in orientalist prose was adopted by American poets, who borrowed Far Eastern poetic models to permanently transform the ways in which poetry in English was being written by launching a literary assault upon what they saw as outmoded methods of versification. Moore used the Far East to express her own dissatisfaction with contemporary trends in the writing of poetry, and embraced the more ancient culture of China as a means of resisting the American habit of looking to Europe as a singular source of cultural tradition 'at home'. Moore employed features of the ancient Chinese fu technique in her poems and used images of Chinese supernatural creatures in an effort to establish an alternative to logic and narrative linearity and to facilitate the moral didacticism for which her poetry is known. Moore's use of Chinese painting theory and philosophy in the creation of her poems enabled her to explore alternatives to Western perspectival principles and to Western ways of narrating visual experience. Marianne Moore and China also examines the ways in which Chinese linguistic features provide Moore with models for her compound nouns and syntactical ellipses, and gathers evidence to show that her abiding concerns for precision, brevity and restraint have both Confucian and Puritan antecedents. Additionally, this book analyses the degree to which her collection of quotations, from which she fashions so many of her poems, and her citation of them in numerous appended notes, are complicit in the same process of acquisition and display which characterizes the activity of the museum, the preoccupations of the curio-collector, and the pursuit of minute detail in orientalist discourse generally. Moore's consistent ingenuity in employing Chinese forms and methods makes her work a particularly fruitful source for investigating orientalism and its contribution to modern poetry.

On Discourse and Power: "Cults" and "Orientals" in Fiji

Abstract: Essences are not origins, as is made clearer when approaching discourse via methods of Latour rather than Foucault. Tracking the emergence of power in the alignment of heterogeneous agents, institutions, and objects, we contrast the fates of efforts by two British colonial officials in Fiji, one who sought to outlaw a "dangerous" movement in 1887 and a second who sought to thwart union organizing among "orientals" in 1935. Though the second effort fit more closely with an existing grand discourse ("orientalism"), the first aligned changing fields of interest in Fiji and empire. The first gained the power to represent the real, and the second did not. Realities of colonial power contradict Latour's principle of symmetry, but not the rest of his approach to the making of power, [discourse, power, orientalism, cargo cults, colonialism, Latour, Foucault, Fiji]

Orientalism and Resistance to Orientalism: Muslim Identities in Contemporary Western Europe

Abstract: This chapter is about Orientalism and Muslim identities in Western Europe, particularly insofar as the production and reproduction of Muslim identities constitute a response to Orientalism. One’s identity consists only partly of how one sees oneself; it also consists of how one is seen by others. As such, while this chapter is clearly about religious identities, it can be situated within the sociological debates about racism and ethnic identities which have taken place since the mid-1980s. Muslims are often defined in the West in racialized terms. By racialization we mean ‘those instances where social relations between people have been structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such a way as to define and construct differentiated social collectivities’, and ‘a process of categorisation, a representational process of defining an Other (usually, but not exclusively) somatically’ (Miles, 1989: 75). In contemporary Britain and France, Muslims are often stereotyped as ‘Pakistani’ or ‘maghrebin ’, terms which may connote an irreconcilable ‘racial’ difference based on a perception of somatic features, such as skin colour.

Reading By Said's Lantern: Orientalism and Chaucer's Treatise On the Astrolabe

Abstract: This paper takes Edward Said's foundational critique of western discourses of knowledge about the orient as a way of intervening in the tradition of reading Chaucer's only scientific text, The Treatise on the Astrolabe. I argue for recognizing the "color" of Chaucer's originary text of "Messahala, an Arabian astronomer, by religion a Jew", and against naturalizing the Treatise as an "unmarked white" text. My argument is that there are cultural and political values at stake in Chaucer's pedagogical text.

New Orientalisms, Global Capitalism, and the Politics of Synergetic Differences:

Abstract: Edward Said has enriched our understanding of ‘othering’ by insisting that the relationship between the Orient and the Occident has been produced as part of a discourse articulated by Western colonial powers — a discourse ‘of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony’ (1978, p. 5). Following Said, some scholars in first-generation critical international relations1 have examined Western foreign-policy discourses about non-Western others through such binaries as ‘East-West’, ‘Occident-Orient’ (‘West-rest’), ‘insider-outsider’, and ‘order-threat’. Drawing on an ‘Asian-Pacific’ case study and an articulation of trade-competitiveness-development discourses in the post-Cold War era between the USA, Japan and the East Asian newly-industrializing countries (hereafter NICs), this chapter proposes a second-generation approach that criticizes and re-examines the unclear boundaries implied in these dichotomies. It thereby broadens the range of ‘others’ to be examined, highlights the variety of discourses deployed to construct difference and otherness, and analyses the politics of difference involved in these various constructions. In particular, it suggests three ‘new kinds of Orientalism’ that go beyond the alleged ‘clashes of civilizations’ between ‘East’ and ‘West’.

Irish Art and National Identity

Abstract: representation of a positive stereotype (be it gracious leisure or physical bravery) only makes sense in contrast to its negative (laziness, sloth, cruelty...). MacKenzie, who accuses Said and his followers of being selective in their choice of material (looking only for negative examples) is himself equally selective. There are only a few lines on the harem, yet this is an institution which many have seen as central to the sexualized myth of the fantasy Orient. It seems strange that a writer who is so attentive to criticisms of gender bias in Said should ignore all the work on the harem from his own period by both Occidental and Oriental writers which explicitly challenges the dominant Western assumption of the harem as a sexual prison. This is an area where wellintentioned Westerners did set themselves against popular prejudice and one that has been the object of much study by scholars today. But it is also an area where the worst excesses of negative stereotyping and the market for them are crystal clear, and where it is apparent how imperial attitudes were also present in the work of those who consciously advocated respect for and understanding of the lives of Oriental women. To leave the harem out of his analysis, when it was central to so much Orientalist culture in the period, and has been a focus of important postcolonial theorizations, creates a sad gap in an otherwise comprehensive study. Overall, this is a book not to be missed. MacKenzie's range of material has expanded our sense of Orientalism in the arts and his attention to audience gives us a clearer picture of the conditions in which these artefacts circulated. If I have some misgivings about this conclusion, I also agree with many of his criticisms. This book will become a standard in the literature on Orientalism.

Disenchanted democracy : Chinese criticism after 1989

Abstract: "Disenchanted Democracy" offers a critical mapping of the unknown waters of Chinese cultural criticism in the politically disenchanted 1990s. It focuses on the theoretical debates of post-Tiananmen Chinese intellectuals, relates those debates to the international context of theory and power, and prepares the ground for further discussions on many important theoretical and political issues.This book breaks new ground in the study of contemporary Chinese intellectual development by allying cultural criticism with a quest for democracy. It approaches democracy, in the context of cultural criticism, less as a series of abstract propositions than as a site or space in which practices of change and good society, pluralism and consensus, knowledge and power, and citizenship and humanity come into sharper focus. Through careful analyses of the 1990s humanist-spirit discussion, new Chinese national studies, and postmodern-postcolonial theory in China, this book reveals how notions of modernity, enlightenment, orientalism, and national and cultural identities are contested in Chinese cultural discussion after 1989."Disenchanted Democracy" will be of interest to students and scholars working on modern and contemporary Chinese cultural and theoretical discourses. An engaging and challenging observation of contemporary Chinese cultural politics, this book will also be welcomed by those who have more general concerns with Chinese society, politics, and intellectuals in the 1990s.Ben Xu is Associate Professor of English, Saint Mary's College of California. He is also the author of "Whither Cultural Criticism, Journey to the Postmodern and the Postcolonial," and "Situational Tensions of Critic-Intellectuals: Thinking through Literary Politics with Edward W. Said and Frank Lentricchia."

Asian-Australian women's writing : literary re-orientations

Abstract: Migrant stories have dominated Australian literature. Beginning with the arrival of British and European colonists, narratives of displacement and alienation have described and often defined the Australian psyche. Despite Australia's history of migrant settlement, however, new ethnic groups have not been generally welcomed by older, established Australian communities. This dissertation considers the writing of Asian-Australian women who are part of the most recent and, historically, most unwelcome migrant group(s). Migration from the Asian region has always generated polarised responses from many sections of the Australian community. Since the 1970s, fears of an impending cultural "Asianisation" have increasingly underpinned discussions (both popular and academic) of past and future relationships between Australia and Asia. Asian-Australian women's literature is examined in relation to the complex cultural contexts in which their work is written and received. I focus on women's writing because it also addresses important, yet often ignored, gendered constructions of national, cultural and ethnic identities. In Australia, the figure of the Asian woman is a powerful signifier of the exotic and erotic, and Asian-Australian women thus produce narratives in an environment shaped by prohibitions from within, and the expectations of, their own ethnic communities as well as other Australian groups. Their texts can be understood as challenging racist and sexist stereotypes and social hierarchies, responding to, and resisting, cultural and critical demands, and refiguring the Asian woman as a new and distinctive voice in the Australianliterary landscape. This thesis argues that Asian-Australian women writers have used a number of innovative techniques in order to relocate their work in a contemporary Australia and rewrite Australian literary traditions. Because they are conscious of the very complex and loaded contexts of reading and writing by, and about, Asian women, they often deliberately invoke and subvert particular stereotypes--of for instance, sisters, matriarchs, and femmesfatales. Asian-Australian women write from multiple locations both inside and outside particular communities and I analyse the connections, intersections and IV disjunctions between gendered, historical and geographical locations within the frameworks offered by feminist, post-colonial and postmodern theories. I read the texts of Lucy Wang (Blood Price), Dewi Anggraeni ("Uncertain Step," "Crossroads," "Mal Tombee," The Root of All Evil and Parallel Forces), Mena Abdullah (The Time of the Peacock). Yasmine Gooneratne (A Change of Skies and The Pleasures of Conquest), Simone Lazaroo (The World Waiting to be Made), Lillian Ng (Silver Sister and Swallowing Clouds), Ang Chin Geok (Wind and Water), Moni Lai Stortz (Notes to My Sisters), Arlene J. Chai (The Last Time I Saw Mother and On the Goddess Rock), Lau Siew Mei ("Sunflower Child" and "Until the Wake"), Uyen Loewald (Child of Vietnam and "Nightmare"), Ding Xiaoqi ("Killing Mum. "and "Jenny") and Beth Yahp (The Crocodile Fury and "The Red Pearl"), in relation to the complex contexts that influence and condition their work and the ways in which the writers transform dominant and enduring myths and stereotypes of Australia, Asia and Asian women. My first chapter, "Lines of Resistance: (multi) Cultural Contexts" reviews Australian histories of migration, nationalism and literature, examining the contemporary multicultural contexts in which Asian women write and demonstrating the ways in which the critical reception of their work has both limited their access to the Australian literary sphere and, to some extent, conditioned what they write about and the ways in which they write. The second chapter, "The Great Southern Land: Reimagining the Australian Landscape," explores the ways in which writers incorporate important images of Australia and Australian mythology into their narratives of displacement, loss, endurance and triumph. Employing traditional themes, the writers depict the landscape as a vast frontier, a great emptiness, a mirror of Australian culture, and a site of change--the quintessential migrant location. As time is an important aspect of the politics of migration, it is used here to construct revised cultural histories. Chapter3, "Asia in Australia: Family Re-Visions" focuses on representations of the effects of relocation on Asian families in Australia. In particular, female members of households are depicted questioning their gendered roles as daughters and wives, while v at the same time negotiating the social practices and prohibitions that operate within their changed and changing Australian communities. The stereotyped role of Asian mothers and character doubles are often used as subversive elements in the novels as writers refigure the Asian woman in an Australian context. In chapter 4, "Inside Out: Refiguring the Margins," the complex and often contradictory figure of the Asian woman is shown emerging as a new and powerful voice in Australia. In an intricate weaving of Asian, Australian and European mythology, Orientalist representations of the virago and femmefatale are drawn larger than life in nightmarish figures of pontianaks, vampires, mermaids and ghosts producing subversive narratives of feminine sexuality and power. These new figures, that challenge existing gendered, ethnic and national community formations, represent an important, but unacknowledged, development in Australian literature.