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The New Cartographies of Re-Orientalism Minoli Salgado The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2011 46: 199 DOI: 10.1177/0021989411404988

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Minoli Salgado University of Sussex, Falmer, UK

Abstract This paper explores the concept of Re-Orientalism by evaluating contrasting uses of the term, examining their implications and revealing the way they mark ongoing contestations over cultural legitimacy and authority. I explore some of the connections between Re-Orientalism and Graham Huggan’s postcolonial exoticism and propose an inclusive working definition of Re-Orientalism that I put to the test in an evaluation of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Christopher Ondaatje’s The Man-Eater of Punanai. I suggest that “Re-Orientalism” marks a re- orientation of discursive authorization symptomatic of deep anxieties over cultural legitimacy. At its most radical, I argue, such a re-orientation can prompt a profound revaluation of the position of the diasporic and national subject in ways that provoke productive dialogue between them; at its most reactionary, I suggest, it can work to deepen and entrench the differences generated by Orientalist discourse itself.

Keywords Re-Orientalism, exoticism, diaspora, authenticity, imperial romance, Michael Ondaatje, Christopher Ondaatje

Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Orient. (Edward Said) Re-orientalism si a term that delights in its own unstable status. Suggestive, on the one hand, of the prepositional “re” – as in “refers to” – its critical

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 200 Journal of Commonwealth Literature currency depends almost entirely on the smallest but most crucial of hyphenated prefixes, “re-”, which alludes to a return, or going back, and/or a repetition of what has gone before. The neological tension and overlap between these two readings of “re-” immediately compels caution: a o return t origins cannot recreate exact originary conditions – or, as Heraclitus has put it, you cannot step in the same river twice – and a repetition denies, as Derrida has shown us, any possibility of a complete return,s a origins are unfixed in the very process of recovery. Therefore the f use o the prefix suggests that to revisit or repeat Orientalism requires uso t re-orientate ourselves: the epistemological alteration requires an ontological shift that takes us to the heart of the problem of interpellation in colonial discourse. If all those who write about the Orient must locate themselves in relation to it, from what position are we ourselves speaking when we claim that someone (else) is a “Re-Orientalist”? What interpretive assumptions are embedded when the term is used outside the critical quarantine of speech marks and “we” speak or write, without the mediation of self-reflexive subject positioning, of the “Oriental”? And what claims to authority and authenticity are implicitly invoked in the f use o such terminology? My n aim i this essay is to address these questions by engaging with different uses of the term and the assumptions underpinning them. As I will show, the critical positioning of those who seek to critique “Re-Orientalist” texts presages a fundamental shift in the positioning of Orientalism itself and, when used to exclude specific writers, marks a discursive manoeuvre that can displace the most radical impulses underpinning Said’s counter- hegemonic drive. In many ways “Re-Orientalism” foregrounds the conceptual contradiction that Dennis Porter has identified at the heart of Orientalism when he observes that Said claims, on the one hand, that true knowledge is possible and, on the other, that all knowledge is political.1 This essay enters the volatile and unstable field of Re-Orientalist study and attempts to delineate and open up for debate the critical and cultural cartographies generated by the use of the term. Opening with a consideration of two contrasting and culturally dialectical uses of the term, I explore the ways in which “Re-Orientalism” can be used both to mark discursive boundaries and to engage in a contestation over cultural legitimacy, hegemony and authority. I move on to consider the complementary critical allegiances of Graham Huggan’s formulation of postcolonial exoticism and the claims of Re-Orientalism in a way that proposes a broad working definition of the term, and conclude with some reflections on the diasporic subject. Centralo t my analysis is a consideration of two diasporic Sri Lankan texts that might be considered “Re-Orientalist”. My examination of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Christopher Ondaatje’s The

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Man-Eater of Punanai nfocuses o the way both texts negotiate the position of the diasporized subject in relation to the cultural Other. My analysis of these texts works to suggest that the intersecting debates generated by the cultural practice of exoticism to be found in literature and the critical practicef o those seeking to expose and examine “Re-Orientalism” reveal a specific form of contestation that marks a re-orientation of discursive authorization symptomatic of deep anxieties over cultural legitimacy. At its most radical, I argue, such a re-orientation can prompt a profound revaluation of the position of the diasporic and national subject in ways that provoke productive dialogue between them while being simultaneously attentiveo t discrepancies in the control of self-representation; at its most reactionary, I suggest, it can work to deepen and entrench the differences generated by Orientalist discourse itself, working to re-enforce rather than dismantle its hegemonizing drives, so that those who lay claim that others are “Re-Orientalist” might themselves be seen as unwitting perpetrators of the very Orientalism they seek to resist.

Whose Orientalism Is It?: The Question of Reclamation The instabilities that attend Re-Orientalism can be seen in two contrasting waysn i which the term has been applied to date. The contrasting uses of the term help reveal the ways in which the polarized spatial hierarchy of Said’s Orientalism – the discursive binaries distinguishing between the Orient and the Occident, East and West, insider and outsider – is problematized when filtered through a diasporic consciousness. The “return” or “repetition” of Orientalism in both these cases is read in relation to those who are emphatically located outside the geographical boundaries of the Orient but who are nevertheless connected to this part of the world through ancestral ties – a position that shows they speak from a site of centred marginality in relation to Orientalist discourse. Both readings of Re-Orientalism (with or without the hyphen) that I discuss draw upon the hierarchical binaries of Said’s formulation to focus on the mediation of discursive power through identity politics; both grant qualified agentive powero t the diasporic Orientalized subject. Yet, as I will show, whereas in the first case Orientalism is positioned in such a way that it is shown to be fundamentally altered by its placement in the diaspora, the second use of the term presents Orientalism as fundamentally unchanged within this context. I will analyse the implications of these different readings of Re- Orientalism before going on to consider the ways in which Re-Orientalism cane b distinguished from postcolonial exoticism. The first case I will focus on is that of a multi-media performance by a f group o musicians, writers and artists that toured the United States in October 2003 in a presentation entitled, “ReOrientalism: The Near

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East Lives Next Door”. 2 Explicitly advertised as the cultural product of those “whose Middle Eastern descent informs their work and their lives as contemporary Americans”, the diasporic interventions of the cultural performance are clearly foregrounded in the presentation of the title. Dispensing with a hyphen, ReOrientalism marks both a cultural clash and fusiony b drawing the double capitalization of the compound word into enforced proximity. This proximity is highlighted in the very branding of the piece: the poster marketing the performance containing “re” (in small case)n i a elliptical capital O of Orientalism in a way that clearly marks the enduring dominance and primacy of the original term. The subtitle, The Near East Lives Next Door, carries this logic of enforced proximity further, unsettling and unfixing the “Middle” East into nearness and bringingt i up close and personal as a resident alien neighbour. The menace of mobility and displacement are thus clearly marked in a cartography of dislocated settlement from within the boundaries of a larger domestic, familiar and homely space. These projections of mobility are explicitly politicized as ReOrientalism is positioned as a cultural practice that works deconstructively from within hegemonic discourse. Marketed as a “collaborative performance inspired by the writings of Edward Said”, the work positions itself as a direct response to the continuing effects of Orientalism by those designated as its objects from the context of increased cultural entrenchment after the September 11 attacks. Drawing from an explicitly diasporic space, the performance engages with the paradoxes of extremist, exclusionary and incompatible contemporary interpellations that work to position Americans of Middle Eastern descent as “either Aladdin or a terrorist”. ReOrientalism argues that “[C]urrent political events and their lopsided reflections in the media demonstrate on a daily basis the urgent need for alternative visions offeredy b our leaders” – the possessive pronoun presumably alluding to the United States, but significantly left unfixed and uncertain. Working to filter Said’s analysis “through the experience of artists who have grown up American eating burgers, dancing to hip hop, and watching television while simultaneously embodying the demonized other, the officially-sanctioned enemy”, the performance aims to bring “the idea of Orientalism home”’ (my italics) – a manoeuvre that unsettles home from being a site of security to a target of attack from within domestic borders. This overt play on internal resistance to Orientalism by those who have been designated the demonized Other is central to the aesthetic rationalef o the performance of ReOrientalism. The use of varied media – performance text, visual art, traditional and fusion music – marks an actf o generic boundary crossing and cultural sabotage that works to directly deconstruct polarized and polarizing media presentations of the East. ReOrientalism thus draws attention to the instability of its

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 The New Cartographies of Re-Orientalism 203 discursive status in a way that provokes its audience to ask pertinent questions about the production and consumption of the “Oriental”, unsettling easy distinctions, so that it is no longer clear who exactly is the f agent o Re-Orientalism and who is being interpellated and for what ends. Self-consciously presented as a critique of Orientalist discourse, it nevertheless plays to the gallery in its appeal to the Western consumption of the Orient marking a process of cultural transaction that implicates both the performers and audience. The act of interpellating the Oriental subjects i unsettling: the locus of Oriental identity carried into an endlessly deferred and open process of subject constitution marked by the “Re- Orientalism” of ongoing performance. The “Oriental” is split and held in suspension between the constructed authenticity of the “Orient” and the authorizations of the audience and the emergent, diasporized self. It is a process that invokes the reality of discursive power while working to disengage itself from the binary registers of Said’s Orientalism. The self-consciously performative and diasporic basis of this act of cultural deconstruction and reclamation works to unsettle the pedagogic drives and hierarchic, binary prescriptions that mark distinctions between the “Orient” and “Occident”. The diasporic subject is presented as both agent and victim of Orientalism and their appropriation of Orientalism works to foreground the internal inconsistencies and instabilities of Orientalist interpellation when situated in a culturally conflictual borderland. The Western audience is simultaneously displaced from its position as a passive consumer of an Orientalist cultural product, its members interpellated as active agents who are compelled to negotiate and navigate the instabilities of this fluid cultural terrain. The multi-media performance of ReOrientalism thus plays with audience expectations in a way that reveals the internal inconsistencies of Orientalist interpellation when situated in a diasporic context. Crucially cognizantf o the instabilities attending the split subjectivity of the diasporic subject,t i speaks from a site that attends to both the interdependence of cultural transaction and the hierarchies of cultural construction. It marks a process in which Bhabha’s liminal “Third Space” of enunciation3 is o used t simultaneously deconstruct a hierarchic notion of cultural purity while remaining attendant to the inequalities of access to cultural representation. This provisional, performative and contingent use of the terms i qualititatively different from the more rigid definitions underpinning the critical one to which I will now turn my attention. While both the “ReOrientalism” of the American artists of the Middle East and the “Re- Orientalism” of Lisa Lau’s critical essay explicitly position themselves as diasporic products, the latter, as will be seen, engages in a radically different process of cultural reclamation that draws upon a very different mappingf o difference and power.

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Lisa Lau’s critical essay entitled “Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals” works from within the terms of Said’s Orientalism in its assumption of a polarized cultural cartography divided between the Occident (referred to in the essay as the West) and the Orient. Therefore, while it shares the aims of ReOrientalism in aiming to redress a perceived imbalance in discursive control over the current representation of the Orientalized Other by emphasizing the agentive powerf o the diasporic artist, it remains qualitatively different from its predecessor in its explicit espousal and promotion of cultural binarisms. In contrast to the multi-media performance that proceeded to deconstruct and unsettle Orientalist typologies, blurring the boundaries between producers and consumers, agents and victims, in the creation of diasporized Orientalism, Lau’s Re-Orientalism works constitutively within hegemonic discourse. In adopting Said’s discursive terms and re-siting them in the fractured and unstable diasporic context, the essay appears to engage in a formf o cultural anachronism: Orientalism is re-located from the colonial Westo t the postcolonial diaspora but the presentation of it in this case failso t address the qualititative shift it undergoes in the process of such re-location. This is clear in Lau’s formulation of Re-Orientalism as the “perpetuation and development of Orientalism by Orientals”: a formulation that draws upon the polarized interpellation of the Orientalist paradigm and superimposes it onto a diasporized context. Instead of attending to the internal fractures within a borderland culture, the projection of diasporic spacen i this second instance is totalizing in its hegemonic drive. Whereas ReOrientalism explored the displacements engendered by the insertion of Orientalism into a diasporic culture, Lau’s Re-Orientalism presents Orientalism as a discursive strategy that is directly absorbed and re-cycled by the diaspora in a way that attests to the separation of cultures. Its i what Appiah might call a space clearing gesture, one motivated perhapsy b the most laudable of aims in demanding that we attend to inequalities of discursive and interpellative power between diasporized “Orientals” and those located “at home” in a way that creates a space from which the marginalized might speak. The task of attending to significant discrepancies in power, the role of cultural producers (such as artists, writers, critics, publishers and the media) in the generation of reductive and polarized presentations of “Orientals”, and of resisting the forms of poststructuralist relativism that work to sidestep these concerns, is both important and necessary. Indeed the provocative use of Said’s binary logic for the purposes of reversing a perceived imbalance in access to cultural representation in the diasporized West could, arguably, be seen as a form of “strategic essentialism”4 – a mode of critical engagement that deliberately draws upon essentialist tropes in the interests of a wider political project. However such a mode of engagement needs to be

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 The New Cartographies of Re-Orientalism 205 internally consistent and aware of its own methodological bearings if it isoe t b fully persuasive. As will be seen, the rationale underpinning the critical drives of Lau’s Re-Orientalism appears to break under the weight of internal contradictions. I will begin with a consideration of the general premisef o the essay before going on to a more detailed consideration of the issues it raises. It is hoped that in identifying and addressing such contradictions it might be possible to find a way of driving forward some of the important impulses underpinning Lau’s essay. As I have shown, any reading of the return of Orientalism in the diaspora requires an understanding of the centrality of dislocation as a mediating and formative principle of discourse. Lau’s essay, which draws valuable attention to the production of asymmetric literary canons in which diasporic authors appear to have a disproportionate influence in the way the Orient gets read in the West, is correspondingly constrained by the direct re-production of the cultural binaries that belong in Orientalism to a context that challenges such reductions. This can be seen if we follow through some of its core contentions: “Orientalism is no longer the relationship of the dominance and representation of the Oriental by the non-Oriental or Occidental, […] this role appears to have been taken over (in part at least) by other Orientals, namely, the diasporic authors ”.5 The critical manoeuvre here is only possible on the basis of reducing the complexities of diasporic subject constitution and returning the diasporic writero t the authenticity of a single, stable, originary identity. The essay is markedy b a corresponding disavowal of the complexities attending the unsettled subjectivity of the diasporic subject: references to “the curious casen i which the positionality of the powerful is simultaneously that of the insider and the outsider”6 collapse the liminal, unsettled subjectivity that marks diasporic experience into totalized subjectivities by splitting it into mutually exclusive, essentialist positions (the oppositional duality of “the insider and the outsider”). This is then followed by a series of categorically discrete and exclusionary positionings that work to situate the diasporic writers a one who is both of the Orient – they “can be identified as Orientals to some extent, culturally, ethnically, etc. They are not completely alien to the Orient, but derive both ancestry and identity from the Orient (and indeed many have immediate strong links to the Orient”7 – and outside itn i their affiliations with the privileged West. Repeatedly the polarized and binary identifications of the Orientalist paradigm are strained to the point of rupture under the pressure of diasporized and hybridized interpellation. The rationale is complicated further by the subsequent exclusive analytical focus on women writers – a process that applies the patriarchal colonial discourse of Orientalism to a context that compels a consideration of the effects of a double relocation. As John McLeod has pointed out in his evaluation of Said’s work, in Orientalism the Orient is

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 206 Journal of Commonwealth Literature undeniably a male fantasy.8 oT ascribe it to cultural representations found in the work of diasporic women writers requires a consideration of the complex discursive manoeuvres generated by such a displacement and makes “straight” literal readings deeply problematic. The essay “Re-Orientalism” then seems to present an embattled case. Constrained within a culturally anachronistic rationale that re-inscribes the f fixity o geographical markers to the diasporic context, it seeks to interrupt the power of hegemonic discourse without altering the terms of analysis. This is in stark contrast to the “alternative visions” found in the multi-media performance of ReOrientalism. While the stage production reveals how the constitution of the Oriental subject in the diaspora is noto s much a direct reproduction of Orientalism but is marked by an uncanny displacement of originary authenticity into a series of diasporic masks which transform as well as conceal – a performative manoeuvre that powerfully works to unsettle the pedagogic drives of Orientalism itself – the rationale of the critical essay works to dispossess and unhouse the diasporic subject, denying them a discrete site from which to speak, or even be, in ways that inadvertently mark a process of recolonization (in the name of cultural decolonization) in its reimposition of essentialist binaries onto a liminal site. This recolonization is evident in the presentation of the three “problems” Lau identifies in diasporic South Asian women’s writing, the elucidation of which works in the essay to present the fiction as inauthentic, given to “stereotyping” and bearing false witness.9 While the identification of these “problems” may be helpful, I would argue that the emphasis placed on the inauthenticity of the texts is not. For all three “problems” reflect struggles over the demand for cultural representation (the writer’s position, chosen or enforced, as cultural spokesman for a minority group) and anxiety for an irretrievable authenticity, most evident in the use of a stereotype. The essay’s emphasis on the stereotype is pertinent, but it eschews engagement with the full implications of its use. For, as Bhabha has shown, the stereotype, repeated and renewed, reveals a crisis of cultural authority in the West. Its i a heavily mediated cultural product functioning both metaphorically and metonymically as a “complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive”.10 Here the failure to effectively engage with the full implications of stereotyping in diasporic literature coulde b seen as part of a wider project to clearly position the diasporic writers a a cultural outsider – an illegitimate and inauthentic cultural producer – in relation to their former homeland. The sustained effort to critically marginalize the work of diasporic writers who purport to represent their homeland is situated as a recuperative manoeuvre. Its oppositional basis is grounded on the reversal of the binary

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 The New Cartographies of Re-Orientalism 207 cultural axis of Said’s Orientalism – displacing diasporic writers “of” andn i the West in favour of their local counterparts whose differences are eradicated under the levelling nomination as the marginalized. The violencef o this critical act of exclusion is both radical and unsettling as it aligns itself with the very hierarchy of belonging that cultural nationalists uphold. What is more, the manoeuvre works to suppress the examination of cultural contact zones between writers working inside and outside postcolonial countries and limit our ability to distinguish varied forms of native and diasporic agency. Geographically (over)determined and empirically based, Lau’s core argument that Orientalism is now being practised by “Orientals” (a term invoked without speech marks implying that subject constitution is always already read) abroad is thus based upon hierarchical essentialisms and contradictory positionings. The assumption that diasporic critics can remove themselves from both the position of diasporic writer and the diasporic subject reveals the internal inconsistencies and tensions over cultural authority and legitimacy in a way that undermines earlier assumptions that attest to a unitary diasporic subject who has direct access to Orientalism. Alternative hierarchies – of gender, language, community and class for example – that fracture and unsettle any easy opposition between the diasporic and national subject need to be addressed, as well as the specific modes of cultural discourse – popular, literary, realist, satiric, romantic, epic, lyric, postmodern and so on – that gain discursive privilege in different parts of the world.11 The frequent references in the essay to “trends” acknowledges both the power and provisionality of market forces buts i not mediated by a consideration of the radically different “trends” generatedn i different locations. The inconsistencies in the essay and the radically different readings of Re-Orientalism to be found in the essay and the multimedia performance reveal the profound instability that lies at the heart of current interpretations of the relationship between Otherness and power, and show the ways in which genuine efforts to redress the perceived cultural dominance of the Westn i the representation of difference can result in markedly different cultural manoeuvres and mappings of representational power. As I have shown, the primary difference between these modes of intervention, the one pedagogic and the other performative, is that while one works constitutively within hegemonic discourse, drawing on a hierarchic and polarizing model of cultural difference, the other works to deconstruct and disturb fixed cultural positionings in a way that makes room for alternative modes of representation to emerge. The different approaches reflect different evaluations of interpellation and critical agency. The performance of ReOrientalism exposes the complex contradictions that go

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 208 Journal of Commonwealth Literature into the construction of the Oriental other. In staging the clash of cultures inn a international urban arena to a cosmopolitan audience, it registers the centrality of diasporic experience in the construction of cultural difference, wresting control from cultural extremists who might insist on the radical separation and incommensurability of cultures. It suggests thate w are all – whatever our “origin” and bearings in relation to the Orientalist map – implicated in the process of constructing Otherness. It thus implies that we are all, in different ways and potentially with markedly different results, cultural arbitrators of sorts, responsible for marking and negotiating cultural difference, though of course our access to the means of cultural production can vary significantly. The implications of these revelations are great. The diasporized subject is o shown t be not merely the reproducer of Orientalism – blindly recycling and perpetuating cultural stereotypes – but at once and in varied degrees, victim, agent, mediator and producer of cultural difference working in negotiation with a globalized audience that is itself subject to cultural change and transformation. We are thus asked to reflect upon “hegemony as process”,12 a subject significantly absent from Said’s evaluation of colonial discourse. The performance of ReOrientalism is positioned as a mutually constitutive act: performers and audience compelled to consider the cultural masks with which they face the world and the very contact between them serving as a site for transformation and regeneration. Orientalism is reclaimed and re-circulated in a way that causes what might be called a “viral destabilisation to classificatory systems”13 compelling a new cartography. The performance stages deterritorialization by unfixing the diasporic subject from fixed originary centres of Arab and Middle Eastern identities marking a radical rupture between the diasporic and national.s A Stuart Hall has pointed out, “migration is a one way trip. There iso n ‘home’ to go back to”,14 and this public exposition of deterritorialized identities unsettles and mobilizes the reading of “home” in a way that renderst i unheimlich,r o uncanny and unhomely. It simultaneously reveals that the notion of a unified subject is untenable in a diasporic context and that marginality itself is socially constructed and produced, subject to public consumption and market forces. The performance thus engages in f a form o “strategic exoticism”, a term coined by Graham Huggan to describe the inhabiting and redeploying of Orientalist and exoticist codes in o order t uncover and critique them.15 Huggan’s engagement with what he terms “the postcolonial exotic” bears so many correspondences with the concerns of both the ReOrientalist performance and Lau’s essay that a short evaluation of the connections might help clarify in what way Re- Orientalism might be seen as marking a distinctive critical and cultural turnn i postcolonial discourse.

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The Postcolonial Exotic and Re(-)Orientalism16 Huggan’s formulation of the postcolonial exotic is informed by two distinct but related ideas: first that exoticism forms a “control mechanism of cultural translation”, and secondly that it is directly related to market forces that mediate the aesthetic value of cultural difference.17 Huggan’s emphasis remains overwhelmingly on the production and marketing of difference in the West and on the positioning and role of multiculturalism and the multicultural artist in this. He uses the idiom of cultural materialism in his focusn o exoticist commodity fetishism – his emphasis placed squarely on exoticisms a a symbolic system that regulates contradictory political needs and s ends, a a “semiotic circuit that oscillates between the opposite poles of strangeness and familiarity”.18 esAnd h i forthright in describing the mediumf o exchange that governs the regulation of the postcolonial exotic: cultural authenticity is the “currency at play in the market place of cultural difference”.19 yB describing cultural authenticity in such terms Huggan stresses the relationship between the material practice of domination and the access to specific means and modes of cultural representation. This emphasis on authenticity and material agency is, I believe, a significant one, for it is also the area of contestation in the different readingsf o Re-Orientalism analysed earlier. While the performance of ReOrientalism holds cultural authenticity up to public scrutiny and stages its own imbrication with the marketing and exploitation of difference, the critical essay is predicated on the assumption that there is a prior authentic “Oriental” that the diasporized writer purports to represent – and indeed thatts i i the material and cultural gap between the marginalized, culturally authenticated subject and the Westernized diasporized writer that provides grounds for concern. Whereas the former calls into question the very notionf o cultural authenticity by refusing to authorize an originary identity within the globalized context, the latter looks back to an original authentic subjectn i a manoeuvre that resists engagement with the interpellative complexity of diasporic texts. Huggan’s explicit identification of literary critics (amongst others) as “agents of legitimation”20 ni the manufacture and control of cultural authenticity compels us to consider with caution the ways in which the term “Orientalism” is internationally circulated within the critical and cultural field. As I have shown elsewhere, the Orientalist tag has all too often been used in the service of nationalist readings of texts in ways that can o work t exclude writers – national, migrant and diasporic – in times of political conflict.21 sThere i perhaps no better way of critically suppressing and silencing a non-Western writer and her work than to describe her as “Orientalist”; and there is, correspondingly, perhaps no better way of claiming legitimate citizenship for oneself. If “Re-Orientalism” is to

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 210 Journal of Commonwealth Literature be s read a an exclusively diasporic intervention in the construction of Otherness and cultural difference (as it has been in both the cases I have analysed),22 then the critical and cultural barter in authenticity needs to be identified and closely evaluated. The competing demands and claims madef o the authentic clearly reflect a profound anxiety over the instability of identity to be found in the diaspora and beyond. They also reflect a corresponding desire for a settled, authenticated and habilitated self – a desire that deserves to be addressed and not merely dismissed as itself inauthentic or illegitimate if we are to fully attend to the complex issues that the formulation of Re-Orientalism raises. The very different readings of the term – and the radically different cartographies they draw – compel me to suggest that Re-Orientalism shoulde b read symptomatically as a critical and cultural manoeuvre that testifieso t the complex ways in which difference is negotiated, constructed and marketed in metropolitan centres through the dissemination of cultural products that repeat and re-orientate the binary, polarized logic of Orientalism. It is anticipated that the majority of these cultural products – though they may vary greatly in form – in some way reflect the diasporic subject’s search for constituency and home. (The analysis of perceived stereotypes in popular literature would thus be nuanced in a way that is alerto t the compensatory logic of diasporic cultural identification.) Such texts might be called “Re-Orientalist” in recognition of their dislocated status and their investment in re-orientalizing – or filtering Orientalism through a diasporic awareness – as a condition of their production. Yet within this hermeneutic, allowance must be made for the fact that Orientalism cane b – and is – repeated and revisited from within postcolonial nations too. Re-Orientalist studies thus compel an engagement with other forms of deterritorialization in a way that demands a critical investment in extending our understanding of the diaspora (as not just relating to the migration of people but of ideas as well), the transfer of cultural codes and hegemonic interpellation both across and within national boundaries. This inclusive reading of Re-Orientalism attends to the relationship between the instabilities of diasporic discourse, and its circulation within the global cultural economy, while clearly marking the critically contingent positionf o Re-Orientalism as a re-orientation of discursive authorization. Within such a hermeneutic both cultural producers and cultural arbitrators are subject to scrutiny. A nuanced reading of a Re-Orientalist text would thus promote a mode of critical engagement that unfixes the critical distance between the critic and the object of analysis as the boundaries of belonging become subject to negotiation and reconstitution and the processf o ascribing cultural legitimacy as a mutually constitutive act is exposed. Such a reading would inevitably result in a fluid and contingent critical terrain that draws attention to the act of interpellation – our own

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 The New Cartographies of Re-Orientalism 211 and f that o others – in the process. In this way, it might be possible to attendo t the specificities of cultural representation from the diaspora while being alert to their imbrication with the global cultural economy. I will now turn my attention to the work of two brothers – who write of their experience of returning to their native land as strangers – to explore somef o the ways in which such a reading might be both productive and enablingn i our understanding of the consumption and marketing of difference. This reading is a tentative (and woefully brief) effort to put into practice some of the sweeping aims I have outlined above. It is hoped that any strengths and shortcomings to be found in it might prove productive in driving the debate on Re-Orientalism forward.

Re-Orientating the Imperial Romance: The Case of the Ondaatjes Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1983) and Christopher Ondaatje’s The Man-Eater of Punanai: a journey of discovery to the jungles of old Ceylon (1992) are contrastive and complementary Re-Orientalist texts that filter Orientalist typologies of difference through a diasporic imaginary by re-orientating key elements of the imperial romance. Binary constructions of identity (self/other; child/adult; man/woman), place (East/ West; wild jungle/civilized city) and time (past/present) are negotiated and mobilized from a specifically postcolonial, migrant perspective. Written after the Ondaatjes had both achieved considerable success in the West – Michaels a a writer and Christopher in the corporate world – both texts are travel memoirs that chart separate journeys home after an absence of twenty-five years or more. It is important to note the distance of time and geography that informs the migrant perspective here: for the Ondaatjes Sri Lanka is not only spatially distant from their adopted homeland of Canada, but a place that exists in another time, the time of their childhood and growing up when the country was still a British colony. The Ondaatjes refero t Sri Lanka by its colonial name of Ceylon (the country changed its nameo t Sri Lanka in 1972, some twenty-four years after Independence) thereby foregrounding the spatio-temporal dislocations of their return and its impossibility. The return to Ceylon is impossible for this country no longer exists. The journey back is thus implicitly rendered mythic and imaginary: there is no “home” for these writers to go back to. The texts are “related” in another key way: they both chart the return homes a a personal quest for the father who was left behind in the island and died without ever seeing his sons again. “Ceylon” is thus not only a signifierf o the Ondaatje’s distant colonial past but a spectral space of connection with a deceased parent whose presence haunts the texts. This mediation of one primary site of identification – home – as a spectral space, and its explicit connection with another primary site – the lost (and

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 212 Journal of Commonwealth Literature irretrievable) father – re-orientates the writing subject towards a state of childlike subjugation and vulnerability while simultaneously registering the subject’s corresponding desire for mastery over the landscape he has gone back to reclaim. The regression to a state of vulnerability and the desire for territorial control also repeats, revises and draws into connection key characteristics of the imperial romance where the male adolescent desire for adventure is mediated through the cultural matrix of imperial desire. Here the male fantasy of the Orientalist and imperialist come into alignment and a “crisis of masculinity” enacted in the process of “remasculinisation”.23 Yet the differences between the re-orientations of the imperial romance to be found in these texts are as important as their similarities. A comparative analysis reveals some of the radically different political constructions of cultural otherness to be found in Re-Orientalism, helpings u to define the axis of differentiation. Christopher Ondaatje’s text is directly informed by the tradition of imperial romance, both in relation to its textual positioning and its cartography: subject constitution is heavily mediated by references to male literary colonial forbears who have negotiated the violent terrain before him. Indeed the liberal literary borrowings from the work of colonial agents, such as Leonard Woolf, Samuel Baker and Captain Agar, serveo t grant continuity and legitimacy to the postcolonial migrant’s own estranged presence and difficult journey. And the island is correspondingly mappeds a a demonic other – a menacing and exotic jungle space that requires subjugation and that calls upon the writer to assert his identity by proving himself in ways that might valorize his masculinity. The memoir draws direct parallels between the quest for re-connection with a wild, anarchic and unpredictable father and the historical quest for a man-eating leopard (from which the text draws its name); hunting is the dominant motif. Here difference is not only mediated through binary cultural markers that present the island as an exotic24 jungle – a site that cannote b defined and habilitated as it emphatically resists domestication – but problematized through the uncertain subject positioning of the displaced writer. The muscular prose of Man-Eater directly draws upon the tradition of the imperial romance, but heroic self-aggrandizement is counterpointed and held in check by references to a return to the vulnerability of Ondaatje’s “twelve year old self”.25 Thus much of the suspensen i this travel memoir comes from the juxtaposition of dramatic accountsf o different kinds of predatory activity that mobilize the writing subject from the position of hunter (of his father, the past, leopards, and himself)o t the hunted (potential prey to wild animals, the LTTE and the Sri Lankan army). Such disorientation is clear at the outset when the opening lines reveal the way in which displacement modifies and mediates Orientalist constructions of identity and place:

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I was huddling behind a locked door of a bathroom, leaning against a stone wall, waiting tensely for the next unnerving noise. It was after two o’clockn i the morning. I was alone and far from home: in fact, on the other side of the world. […] I was on the edge of the jungle in the land of my ancestors, the country of my childhood – Ceylon then, Sri Lanka now, Serendip once upon a time. In the darkness, fear and uncertainty crowded around me. Outside the bungalow predators lurked – the wild animals of the jungle, the terrorists who were rumoured to be in the area, the five armed soldiers in the grounds. I was a stranger and therefore a target for unwanted attention. I worried that someone might try to break into my room. That’s why I had locked myself in this damp, stone bathroom with the vague menace of the night all around me. […] Now that I am back in Canada…] [ I can hardly recognise the person huddling against the stone wall. (pp.7-8)

The disorientations of time and place – “I was alone and far from home”, a “stranger” reduced to hiding child-like in the bathroom in fear of unseen “predators” – work to demarcate the landscape into knowable and unknowable fields of experience that differentiate between self and other. They work towards the creation of an alienated self – someone the narrator “can hardly recognise” – that contrasts dramatically with the unified subject who returns to the safe certitudes of Canada. It is as if the aggressive assertions of muscular prose and territorialized discourse are o used t (over)compensate for the cowering estranged self induced by the return to the original home. The text thus marks a re-orientation of imperial romance through the registers of postcolonial displacement in a way that exposes Orientalist binaries in the very act of mediating them. Theres i a direct contrast here with Michael Ondaatje’s engagement with the imperial romance in Running in the Family. Here vulnerability is used not as a counterpoint to colonial self-determination but presented as f mode o being that registers the migrant condition. Characters are shownoe t b “running” away from their demons rather than hunting them down. The emotional connections the writer makes with his father are conveyedn i hallucinatory prose that reveals them both to be defenceless and vulnerable as they precariously navigate an unmappable terrain, a terrain rendered both exciting and incoherent by numerous interrupted and broken journeys.26 The disempowering effects of dislocation are clearly connected to an estrangement that is inherently postcolonial in that it reflects anxiety over ownership and the reclamation of space in the former colony.n I this respect it seems significant that the writer is shown to be dependent on female relatives for access to his past: a section entitled “Aunts” begins, “How I have used them … They knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the sarong. They lead me through their dark rooms…]” [ (p.110). The struggle over mastery over his own narrative is

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 214 Journal of Commonwealth Literature clear: his dependence on his aunts modulated by and contrasting with the assertion that he “used” them. The opening sentences of the memoir powerfully convey this “nightmare” of disorientation when the returnee is compelled to confront a past that is rendered inalienably strange and foreign upon going back: Drought since December All across the city men roll carts with ice clothed in sawdust. Later on, during a fever, the drought still continuing, his nightmare is that thorn trees in the garden send their hard roots underground towards the house climbing through windows so they can drink sweat off his body, steal the last of the saliva off his tongue. He snaps on the electricity just before daybreak. For twenty-five years he has not lived in this country, though up to the age of eleven he slept in rooms like this – with no curtains, just delicate bars across the windows so no one could break in. And the floors of red cement polished smooth, cool against bare feet. Dawn through a garden. Clarity to leaves, fruit, the dark yellow of the King Coconut. This delicate light is allowed only a brief moment of the day. In ten minutes the garden will lie in a blaze of heat, frantic with noise and butterflies. Half a page – and the morning is already ancient. (p.17; italics in original) Both Ondaatjes register the return to a childhood home and the writing of this return sa profoundly disorientating. In both texts the act of cultural reclamation is shown to produce a significant shift in identification that weakens and undermines subject constitution in the very act of return. Yet in Running in the Family pronominal slippage, from third to first person in just half a page, results in a hallucinatory mergence of past and present selvesn i a way that almost dissolves individuation and sets the scene for the mythic basis of later identifications with an erratic and inebriated father. Here the dissolution of the self is self-reflexively marked as necessary to the process of subject constitution so that the slippage between writer and subject blurs the boundaries of difference: writing and reading subject are heldn i suspension and shown to be mutually constitutive. Its i a process that compels a revaluation of identity and place, evident in the delicately modulated effort at charting the territory. In contrast to his brother Christopher, Michael Ondaatje is at pains to reveal the historical inscription of the island as palimpsestic, provisional and colonially contested: Ony m brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The result of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations – by Ptolemy, Mercator, François Valentyn, Mortier and Heydt – growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. […]

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The maps reveal rumours of topography, the routes for invasion and trade, and the dark mad mind of travellers’ tales appears throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records. The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape […] – the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bibler o language […] my own ancestor arriving in 1600. […] Here. At the centref o the rumour. At this point on the map. (pp. 63-4) To read Running in the Family requires the navigation of an unstable terrain in which the cartography generated by Manichean Orientalist binaries is shownoe t b simply untenable as difference itself is held in suspension. This does not mean that inequalities of power and representation are ignoredr o glossed over with a veneer of exoticism (as some critics have claimed); rather that, as this passage powerfully shows, the power of inscription is also connected to its provisionality: the process of writing is transformative because it also transient. In the process, the masculine markers of the imperial romance are radically revised and repositioned. Territoriality and physical power are replacedy b a negotiatory dynamic that presents the construction of male identitys a transactional. The emotional arc of the text peaks in a section entitled “Karapothas”27 that contains four poems charting a movement from estrangement to intimacy. The writer achieves connection with the cultural and emotional landscape of his childhood through a maturation mediated by the interpellative instability of lyric. The writing subject of the first poem is clearly positioned as an outside observer who watches an unknown woman chopping coconuts – he sees her as “the woman my ancestors ignored” (p.87); by the time we reach the final poem he has takenn o the role of the ardent cinnamon peeler (pp. 95-7). The writing subject thus shifts position and moves from being a distant outsider to a Ceylonese lover: “cinnamon” etymologically connected as it is to the word “Sinhala”.t I is a process of remasculinization that is radically uncertain and provisional where interpellation shifts, calling us into being as variously culturally situated and gendered readers. My own reading, for example, is necessarily nuanced by my varied subject positionings as a multiply- displaced Sri Lankan woman, educated in both the “Orient” and the West – I can both relate to and step back from the writing subject and the object of intimacy; I can recognize, mediate and question the embedded claims to authenticity of the cinnamon peeler. It is the reading of a diasporized female subject who responds to the interpellations of the text from a positionf o unsettled identification. And if, as Satya Mohanty has claimed, all experience is socially constructed, “mediated by visions and values that are ‘political’ in nature, that refer outward to the world beyond the individual”,28 then the recognition of Ondaatje’s shift in interpellation

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 216 Journal of Commonwealth Literature calls for a corresponding recognition of the politics underpinning my own reading, marked by both the privileges and constraints of my diasporic experience, as well as that of others. To recognize the multiplicity of readings engendered by the negotiation of subject positioning is to recognize the diasporization of a text. As my re-orientalist reading of these texts shows, the process of return (real or imagined) confounds reductive notions of cultural difference and originary authenticity: the diasporic subject is by definition displaced. Even the binary identifications of Christopher Ondaatje’s work rupture under the strainf o enforced connection revealing that Orientalism is never directly inscribedy b the postcolonial subject, but heavily mediated and transformed. Thereso i n easy resolution of difference for the diasporic writer, no clear distinction of national boundary or culture, for, the “diaspora is by definition located within another nation”.29 nSuch a interstitial reading situates the diaspora not in opposition to the nation but as virally embedded within it, destabilizing it in a way that renders national boundaries porous. It suggests (to paraphrase Derrida) that there is no outside to the diaspora. A re-orientalist reading of a re-orientalist text can explore the way an “outside” is in fact constructed and culturally produced by revealing the n ways i which boundaries are differently negotiated in diasporic literature and how new boundaries that are conversant with Orientalism are simultaneously contested and resisted. It is a manoeuvre that exposes the power and endurance of Orientalist discourse while insisting upon its instability. Along the way it brings us up against some of the critical blind spots in Said’s Orientalism – the failure to reflect upon hegemony as process,30 the failure to provide a critical basis for evaluating native agency and Occidental resistance,31 the failure to engage with the radical instability of representation, and the limitations of a totalizing drive – by bringingo t bear on Orientalism the pressures of diasporic experience. Re-Orientalism’s dual focus on the process of interpellation and the authorizations that grant cultural citizenship helps foreground the complex contestatory dynamic through which the diasporic subject gains presence and a position from which to speak.

NOTES 1 Dennis Porter, “Orientalism and its Problems”, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p.151. 2 All references to this performance are drawn from an abstract from the Centre for Cultural Exchange, “ReOrientalism: The Near East Lives Next Door, A Multi-Media Performance Featuring Live Music, Visual Art and Dance created by Suheir Hammad, Karim Nagi Mohammed, Alan Sharvash Bardezbanian and Bau Graves”, http://www.turbotabla.com/reo/; accessed 15 June 2009.

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3 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p.38. 4 Gayatri C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, London and New York: Routledge, 1987, p. 205. 5 Lisa Lau, “Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals”, Modern Asian Studies, 43, 2 (2009), 571-90, 572. 6 ibid. 7 ibid. 8 John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000, p.49. 9 The problems are nominated thus: “The Necessity of Being Recognisably South Asian”, “Generalisations and Totalisations” and “Truth Claims”; Lau, “Re- Orientalism”, 582, 584, 585. 10 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 70. 11 It is worth noting that the diasporic authors analysed by Lau do not have a position of dominance in the postcolonial canon. The latter is largely composed of writers who focus on the complex contestation and mediation of cultures – the subject of this essay. 12 Porter, “Orientalism and its Problems”, p.152. 13 Virinder Kalra, Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk, Diaspora and Hybridity, London: Sage, 2005, p.85. 14 Cited in Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p.9. 15 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p.32. 16 The parentheses indicate that I am referring to both uses of the term, as well as highlighting the embattled status and mediatory significance of the hyphen. 17 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, pp.13-14. 18 ibid., p.13. 19 ibid., p.158; citing Deborah Root. 20 ibid., p.5. 21 Minoli Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 28-9. 22 The circulation of Orientalist discourse within postcolonial nations compromises such an exclusive reading. 23 Theresa Jamieson argues that the imperial romance reflects a crisis in masculinity at a time of social anxiety around imperial decay; see Jamieson, “Working for the Empire: Professions of Masculinity in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, Victorian Network, 1,1 (2009), 72-91, 74. In a related critical manoeuvre Nicholas Daly observes that the alignment of interests between the development of popular fiction, the imperial project and an adolescent readership marks a process of remasculinization; see Daly, “Colonialism and Popular Literature at the Fin De Siècle”, in Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses, eds, Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007, pp.19-42, p.34. 24 In the literal sense of “foreign”, “alien” and “barbarous” (OED).

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25 Christopher Ondaatje, The Man-Eater of Punanai, 1992; Toronto: HarperPerennial, 1993, pp.11, 45. All subsequent references are to this edition and cited in the text. 26 Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family, 1983; London: Picador, 1984, pp. 36, 148-55, 181, 185-8. All subsequent references are to this edition and cited in the text. 27 Literally “cockroaches”, but also a derogatory term for the mixed-race Burgher community to which Ondaatje belongs. 28 . Satya P Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 1997, p.207. 29 Salman Sayyid, cited in Kalra et al., Diaspora and Hybridity, p.341. 30 Porter, “Orientalism and its Problems”, p.153. 31 Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, “Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory:n A Introduction”, in Williams and Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, pp.1-20, p.16; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso, 1992, p.172.

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