Comparative Literature Studies

Comparative Literature Studies 37.2 (2000) 223-238

In the Wake of Orientalism

James P. Rice

The New York Times Sunday Magazine several years ago ran a cover article with the (at least at that time) provocative title of "Is Deconstruction Dead?" The author of the article asked Stanley Fish what he thought, and he replied "Yes, deconstruction is dead. It is dead like Freudianism is dead. It is dead and it is everywhere."

We may well ask the same question of Edward Said's influential Orientalism. ¹ In the various disciplines comprising what we understand be Asian Studies, we now live in the wake and, if you will, "counter-wakes" of Edward Said's landmark work. This is a time when seemingly every academic volume, paper, and conference panel uses Said's critical framework as the de rigeur point of departure, a trope--positive or negative--for any critical exercise embracing Asia, at least through the lens of culture or any of its manifestations:

Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. (2-3) [End Page 223]

Said presents a compelling and cogent portrait of a luminescent, rational, Cartesian West systematically inventing and sustaining a dark, pre-rational, exotic Orient to serve as the "Other" against which the topography of a superior Occidental culture and history can continuously emerge in sharp focus. The result, Said asserts, is that we must navigate a kind of perpetually evolving "imaginative geography," in order to make our way to Asia.

. . . the Orient has helped define Europe (or the West), as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. (1-2)

Said's critique has provided a generation of scholars with a useful tool to uncover, expose, and better understand the deeper contexts and subtexts of the West's oscillating views and attitudes towards Asia, as well as those of Asia toward the West. While Said's primary focus is the Middle East, his definition of Orientalism is inclusive of South and East Asia, as he tracks the historical evolution of the term:

What is distinctive about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which is where this study assumes modern Orientalism to have begun, is that an Oriental renaissance took place. . . . Suddenly, it seemed to a wide variety of thinkers, politicians, and artists that a new awareness of the Orient, which extended from China to the Mediterranean, had arisen. (42)

From a literary and philosophical point of view, the history of the Orientalist project--for our purpose here defined as the European and North American encounters with what were identified and eventually canonized as foundational texts--has a long and complex history of a mutually interactive discourse:

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, [End Page 224] ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. (3)

The purpose of this paper is briefly to examine--and compare--the formative stages and parallel trajectories of these encounters in India and China and to examine how those trajectories continue to inform contemporary discourse.

The Indian Encounter

The "discovery" by the West of Sanskrit extended over several centuries and involved primarily missionary scholars from all over Europe. For many years, the principal Vedic texts--the four Vedas and the Vedanta, the "end of the Vedas," which includes...