American Orientalism Within the East/ West Dichotomy

Université d’Oran 2 Faculté des Langues étrangères THESE Pour l’obtention du diplôme de Doctorat en Sciences En Langue Anglaise American Orientalism within the East/ West Dichotomy Présentée et soutenue publiquement par : Boukhatem Hassiba Devant le jury composé de : Yacine Rachida Professeur Université d’Oran 2 Président Bouhadiba Malika MCA Université d’Oran 1 Encadreur Larbi Youcef MCA Université de Mostaganem Examinateur Ghenim Naima MCA Université d’Oran 2 Examinateur Bouhass Fawzia MCA Université de Sidi Bel Abbes Examinateur Année 2016 Dedication For Allah, my very own precious treasure and help. For my family, top of them my mother, daughters, and my husband Mr. Kermeche fetah who, all together, through different times, were the tender wind that carried me where I am today. Acknowledgement I am eternally grateful to my supervisor Dr. Bouhadiba Malika for accepting to take my work in charge and her ongoing encouragement and support. Mention should also be made of my husband, who, along with the kids especially the little Zahra the joy of my life, helped me through stressful times and tried to provide me with a safe haven for work with many enjoyable hours of intellectual discussions. ii Abstract This work places the East / West Dichotomy in cultural constructions informed by American Neo-Orientalism, in the context of relations of war and economic interests. In order to validate and naturalize domination and exploitation of the East, the orientalist ideology had been invented and developed throughout history. This ideology has been comprehensively and critically studied by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978). The world seems to have become much more interdependent and political interrelations between the West and the East have changed radically. Consequently the East/West dichotomy has been influenced by globalization, redistributed and reshaped in a different form in political and military domains, particularly those involving war between the West and the East, between powerful and powerless countries. This thesis deals with the East /West dichotomy as an ideology that promotes an essentialist distinction between ‘the self’ and ‘the other’ and emphasizes an absolute superiority of the former and an essential inferiority of the latter. In the history of thought, the term refers to two mutually exclusive categories of things or principles. Dichotomy in the sense of Dualism versus Monism is a theory that maintains that there is not only one fundamental category necessary for the understanding of reality. Gaston Bachlar has a theory based on the link between knowledge and reality; this theory can be summarized as follow: knowledge is not a copy to or an expression of reality in its truth but is, in all the cases, a reproduction and a restructure of it. This meaning is easily grabbed in theology, where Manichean religions, interpreted all actions and events in the world through a bipolar perspective of Good versus Evil – or God versus the Devil. Similarly, in modern philosophy of mind, dichotomy refers to the theory that states that the mental and the physical – or mind and body – are radically different kinds of things. In this research, however, the term is used to signify a way of thinking that promotes the relationship between ‘the self’ and ‘the other’ in order to justify, rationalize and naturalize domination and iii exploitation. Undisputedly, the East/West Dichotomy is employed to legitimize some implications of hierarchical power and to show who gets what, when and how. Specifically, the dichotomy in this dissertation refers to the sphere of human interaction for the purpose of exploitation and domination. Historically speaking, this Dichotomy was manifested by different ideologies which attempted to justify the domination of others by theorizing superiority based on sex, race, nation and class. The critical part of the dichotomous thought is not that there is merely a difference per se, but a dramatic one, a ‘difference by nature’, illustrating an essential otherness which makes a specific group of men less human and hence subject to domination by another ‘complete’ human being. In the social and political fields, the main intention behind promoting the dichotomous thought is usually to justify the way ‘we’ treat them, even if we, as human beings, do not want to be treated in a similar way. The core of the argument, thus, is that ‘they’ are fundamentally different, totally releasing their cohesion with us as members of the human race. It is clear then that this argument predictably produces on the other side a counter‐response which leads to a counter‐counter‐response, in a ferocious circle of hate. Here, in a brief historical summary I mainly focus on some recent historical examples starting from the Second World War until September 11TH/2001. Altogether show some general characteristics as well as specific ones of American Neo- Orientalism. Even though, at times, they masked themselves through up-to- the-minute justifications, they are indeed but a fraudulent and archaic way of thinking. In the first place, the pragmatic materials for this humble work are the Orientalist elements of how political and military leadership dealt with the course of conflicts, and how they developed the popular, political and military discourses. American Neo- Orientalism has an irregular character properly defined through some interconnections between Orientalism and war and generates violent conflicts in eastern regions. Thus, war and conflicts have always been fundamental to its dominance. Furthermore, traditional Orientalism and American neo-Orientalism have interrelated characteristics; iv the West represents the side that is always on the defensive. This is not only the framework of imperial conquest and domination but also the agenda of obscuring politics, aided by Films, paintings, and popular military histories aiming to profuse, catalog, regularly immortalize and celebrate the American themes in the popular narratives. Whenever the Orientals are attacking, the much obliterated fact is that the United States is invading. Very linked to this scenario is Said’s binary understanding of Orientalism as a way of grasping and finally domesticating the Middle East for American consumption. He argues that the Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture1, it must be stressed that during the growth of consumerism in America, the aesthetics of the Orient became an integral part of American material culture as well. Exploited Orientalist images of exotic lands associated with luxury and sensuality in the Middle East influenced seriously the aesthetic expression of American Orientalism which is in essence material. Naomi Rosenblatt, in his work Orientalism in American Popular Culture (1990), remarks that during the early period, European forms of Orientalism were adapted, creating a culture of aristocratic Orientalism. Hence, the American Orientalism version, turned out to be an expression of cultural superiority by means of material possession. American Orientalism, cultivates this basic perception of an inherent division between the East and the West and more precisely here, the American identity and exceptional vision of itself and consequently of the other. A realist rationalization of American exceptionalism would start with America's exceptional global power since the 1940’s. While Exceptionalism and Orientalism both set up similar discursive, ontological, and epistemological claims about the ‘‘West’’ and its non-western ‘‘others’’, they are ingrained to the core in American political thought that developed in contradistinction to Europe. In this work, I attempt to we demonstrate the different logics of othering at work between the West and the non-West in order to better understand US identity, foreign policymaking, and hegemony within a vision 1 Said Edward . Orientalism; Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Pantheon Books, 1978, p.5 v strongly shaped by ideologies like nationalism, national interest and exceptionalism. Nationalism, a product of modernity, is a mobile power‐greedy ideology which makes false universal claims. It supposes for example that it is the natural order of things. Being based on friend‐foe calculations, it attempts to simplify things and tries to show that it has strict boundaries with others, who are seen as unworthy of respect or recognition. The Second World War illustrated how dangerous and counter‐productive this idea could be in world politics. Nationalism and national interest demonstrate, through Imperial interests in the Middle East and the War on Terror, the picture of the West’s unscrupulous politics that leads to the twenty first century big event: September 11TH 2001. The East/West Dichotomy has become an Islam/ West Dichotomy not dissimilar to the first in essence, because it is based on a binary opposition of superior and inferior religions, races and cultures. It has also been portrayed as an unusual epistemological framework through which the world could be seen as a battlefield between ‘us’ (the West) and ‘them’ (Muslims), with the former enjoying the absolute superiority over the latter. To deal with of the problem of the West and Islam dichotomy is logically to engage with the classic work of Edward Said (1978) Orientalism. A re-examination of his historical observations, his discourse and textual analyses of the dogmas he discovered in Orientalism shall be employed in this work as a consideration of Said’s methodology since his work has its own

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