Page 154 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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The cultural politics of difference

Hence its supposedly ‘inevitable tendency towards subversion’
(p. 33).

Said and Bhabha
The origins of postcolonial theory can be traced to Said’s Orient-
alism, an impressively scholarly account not of ‘the Orient’ itself,
but of how British and French scholarship had constructed
the Orient as ‘Other’. For Said, Orientalism was a ‘discourse’ in
the Foucauldian sense of the term: ‘an enormously systematic
discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and
even produce—the Orient... during the post-Enlightenment
period’ (Said, 1995, p. 3). The ‘Orient’, he wrote, became an
object ‘suitable for study in the academy, for display in the
museum... for theoretical illustration in anthropological, bio-
logical, linguistic, racial and historical theses about mankind and
the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories
about development, revolution, cultural personality, national or
religious character’ (pp. 7–8). This wasn’t simply a matter of
academic ideas reflecting other political interests, as a Marxist
might argue. Rather: ‘Orientalism is—and does not simply repre-
sent—a considerable dimension of modern political–intellectual
culture’ (p. 12). Moreover, it functioned by way of a system of
binary oppositions in which the West, its possessions, attributes
and ethnicities were valorised positively against the inferior
status of colonised peoples. The ‘major component in Euro-
pean culture’, Said concluded, ‘is precisely... the idea of
European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the
non-European peoples and cultures’ (p. 7). Western accounts of
the Orient were thus at least as much an effect of the West’s own
dreams, fantasies and assumptions about the Other as of any
referential ‘reality’ within the ‘Orient’ itself.
Drawing on Said’s understanding of this fantastic quality in
western constructions of the East, Bhabha drew attention to the
fundamentally ambivalent operations of colonial stereotyping. If
the overarching logic of colonial discourse was to ‘construe the
colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of
racial origin’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 70), it nonetheless also set up a

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