Poco for 700

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.

“The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes,

remarkable experiences.” (1)

“My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European

culture was able to manage--and even produce--the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-

Enlightenment period.” (3)

“. . . European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.” (3)  

l“The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire.” (203)

l“Its objective discoveries--the work of innumerable devoted scholars who edited texts and translated them, codified grammars, wrote dictionaries, reconstructed dead epochs, produced positively verifiable learning--are and always have been conditioned by the fact that its truths, like any truths delivered by language, are embodied in language, and what is the truth of language, Nietzsche once said, but

                        a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms--in short, a sum of human relations,                                          which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem                                     firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what                                     they are.

                        Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”(203)

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Bhabha argues that cultural identities cannot be ascribed to pre-given, irreducible, scripted, ahistorical cultural traits that define the conventions of ethnicity. Nor can "colonizer" and "colonized" be viewed as separate entities that define themselves independently. Instead, Bhabha suggests that the negotiation of cultural identity involves the continual interface and exchange of cultural performances that in turn produce a mutual and mutable recognition (or representation) of cultural difference. As Bhabha argues in the passages below, this "liminal" space is a "hybrid" site that witnesses the production--rather than just the reflection--of cultural meaning:

            Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. (2)

            It is in this sense that the boundary becomes the place from which something begins its presencing in a movement not dissimilar to the ambulant, ambivalent articulation of the beyond that I have drawn out: 'Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to other banks....The bridge gathers as a passage that crosses.' (5)

“Increasingly, 'national' cultures are being produced from the perspective of disenfranchised minorities. The most significant effect of this is not the proliferation of 'alternative histories of the excluded' producing, as some would have it, a pluralist anarchy. What my examples show is the changed basis for making international connections. [...] The testimony of my examples represents a radical revision in the concept of human community itself.” (6)