Ignacio
López-Calvo
University
of California, Merced
In
this essay, I will describe a collaborative project to study Orientalism
and south-south dialogs between the "Orient" and the Luso-Hispanic
world that began in 2006 and continues today. It began with an international
and interdisciplinary project titled Orientalisms and the
Chinese Diaspora in the Americas, which took place in April 2006. The initial idea
of studying orientalism and Chinese issues in the Hispanic world was modified
in 2009 to integrate the Asian and Arabic in general at the conference East Reads West;
West Reads East: The Near and Far East in the Western World. The same conference took place again in April 2011 with
the title Imaging the “Oriental”
in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula.
It will meet again in Fez (Morocco) in March 2012 under the title Representation of the Orient
and the "Oriental" in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula and
again in April 2013 in
Created and co-organized the international, interdisciplinary conference "Transcultural and
Transmodern Readings between Eastern and Western Countries," which was held at the
Pedagogical State University A.I. Herzen, St. Petersburg, in
Russia, on
April
12-13, 2013. It had
fifty-five presenters, including
Dr. Lok Siu, from UC Berkeley, who was the keynote speaker
Created and co-organized the yearly international, interdisciplinary conference
"Towards an Alliance of Civilizations: East-West Intercultural
Dialogues" at the Waseda University,
Tokyo, Japan (2014). It had forty speakers, including Ambeth Ocampo (Ateneo de Manila University,
Philippines), who was the keynote speaker.
To
disseminate the information presented at these conferences, I coordinated the
publication of three volumes with extended versions of the best presentations
in each conference. I titled the volumes Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and
Beyond (2007), One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the "Oriental"
in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula (2009) and Peripheral Transmodernities: South-to-South Dialogues between the
Luso-Hispanic World and "the Orient" (2012). They were all
published with Cambridge Scholars Publishing in both digital (e-book) and
printed versions. Complementing these editions, I also co-edited a volume
titled Caminos para la paz: literatura israelí y árabe en castellano
(Paths for Peace: Israeli and Arabic literature in Spanish, 2007), which
included short stories and poems by Arab and Israeli authors who write in
Spanish.
As a result of the success of these
publications, in 2011 I founded, along with my colleague Cristián Ricci, the
interdisciplinary online journal TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral
Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, focusing on peripheral
literary and cultural production of the Luso-Hispanic world and U.S. Latino
worlds. The journal is published by eScholarship, which is part of the University
of California. It promotes the study of south-south cultural relations between
formerly colonized peoples. Although the publication concentrates on
non-canonical works, it also considers articles that approach canonical works
from post-colonial and postmodern angles. Internationally renowned critics,
such as Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo, have published articles in it.
Many of the
essays that were presented in the conferences that I have organized or that
were published in Transmodernity and
the volumes published with Cambridge Scholars Publishing deal with the critical dialogue
between the cultural production of the Hispanic/Latino world and that of the
so-called Orient or the Orient itself, including the Asian and Arab worlds. The
term “Transmodernities” used in the title is borrowed from the Argentine
philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel to suggest a transmodern “pluriverse”
(including European and postcolonial worldviews, such as the Asian, African,
Latin American, and Islamic ones) that refuses to be homologized into a
globalized (or Americanized), univocal hegemonic culture. As we see in these
essays, the Europeans’ cultural others (peripheral nations and former colonies)
have established an intercultural and intercontinental dialogue among
themselves, without feeling the need to resort to the center-metropolis’
mediation (hence the epigraph to this introduction). These South-to-South
dialogues tend not to be as asymmetric as the old dialogue between the (former)
metropolis (the hegemonic, Eurocentric center) and the colonies. Dussel’s term
also contests the idea that Modernity is a uniquely European phenomenon. In
this way, it attempts to transcend (and calls for moving beyond) the concepts
of Modernity and Postmodernity by incorporating non-western knowledges, always
from a critical and ethical perspective. In his view, many other now peripheral
(but formerly central) world cultures have contributed to Modernity: “A future trans-modern
culture–which assumes the positive moments of Modernity (as evaluated through
criteria distinct from the perspective of the other ancient cultures)–will have
a rich pluriversity and would be the fruit of an authentic intercultural
dialogue, that would need to bear clearly in mind existing asymmetries” (18).[1]
These
essays about Hispanic and Latino cultural production (most of them dealing with
literature but some with urban art, music, and film) attest to the veracity of
these abstract, philosophical thoughts, echoing and providing vivid examples of
de-colonizing impetus and cultural resistance. In some of them, we can find
peripheral subjectivities’ perception of other peripheral, racialized, and
(post)colonial subjects and their cultures. They also reflect critical
diasporic thought, border thinking, and everyday living in contact zones.
Others problematize the hegemonic and Occidentalist discourse of the center as
well as its echo: the colonized minds in the periphery. According to Dussel,
this transversal and transmodern intercultural dialogue should produce the
“mutual liberation of universal postcolonial cultures” (16).[2]
Yet, as Ramón Grosfoguel reminds us, our knowledges are always situated: “we always speak from a particular location in
the power structures. Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual,
linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal
world-system’” (4).
As
to the focus on Orientalism in our conferences, this theoretical perspective, has regained
its centrality in recent years, particularly after the increased animosity and
resent between Western and Islamic countries, or between East and West, as a
result of the two Gulf Wars, Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks in Europe and the
United States, the controversial publication on September 30, 2005 of twelve
cartoons featuring the Islamic prophet Mohammed in several European newspapers,
and the new position of the People’s Republic of China as the next military,
economic, and technological superpower. In her study of the genealogical
affinities between theory and cultural studies carried out in the first chapter
of her Ethics after Idealism,
literary and cultural critic Rey Chow presents the critique of Orientalism as
one of the four main forms of analysis to have developed in cultural studies in
the United States in recent years. As she posits, the controversial and seminal study Orientalism (1978) by the
U.S.-based Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward W. Said (1935-2003) does not offer viable alternatives:
Because the issue of otherness is
delineated by Said on the premise of a racial dyad—namely, the white West as
opposed to the non-whine non West—his logic seems to foreclose the possibility
of the non-white non-West every having its own “culture.” Said’s work begs the
question as to how otherness […] could become a genuine oppositional force and
a useable value. (2)
Chow proposes to carry out alternative studies of the racism
and sexism that appear—in a latent or overt form—in the stereotypical
assumptions, misperceptions, and representations of cultural “others” present
in cultural artifacts: “We need to explore alternative ways of thinking about
cross-cultural exchange that exceed the pointed, polemical framework of
‘antiorientalism’—the lesson from Said’s work—by continually problematizing the
presumption of stable identities and also by continuously asking what else
there is to learn beyond destabilized identities themselves” (75).
Our project's
interdisciplinary studies on (the critique of) orientalism and the Asian and Arab diasporas in the Americas and the Hispanic World, address Chow’s question as well as
several others: Can we speak about orientalist discourse when the exoticist
gaze comes from formerly colonized countries? Can a
text be considered orientalist if it exoticizes the other without an obvious
idealization of self? Can we talk about orientalism when dealing with non-eastern
cultures and peoples? How can strategic self-orientalization be used for
economic or political profit? Is the “Orient” still
helping Europe and the Western Hemisphere to define themselves? From Latin America to the
Philippines and from the Iberian Peninsula to the United States, these studies
cover a wide range of geographical areas, topics, approaches, disciplines and
genres, including literature, philosophy, music, film, painting, mass media,
and advertising. As could be expected, several essays in this volume take
Said’s Orientalism as a point of departure to
examine the imaging of the Near and Far East in the Western world. Other
essays, including mine, deal directly with cultural production by or about
people of Asian or Arab descent in the Americas and the Hispanic world. Most of
them, however, share a common interest in issues of assimilation, racism,
migration, transnationalism, citizenship, exile, identity, transculturation,
and hybridity (including musical hybridity, as we see in Kevin Fellezs’s and
Marco Valesi’s essays). And non-Asian social groups can also be “orientalized,”
as Carlos Bazua and Michael Barba argue in their essays on the representation
of the ethnic Other in magazines, television programs, and films.
While it is true that in some cases,
as Julia A. Kushigian posits, the orientalist discourse in the Hispanic literary tradition
has been very different from the one described by Said (she cites the cases
Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Severo Sarduy, and José I. Suárez, in this
book, adds Lusophone authors José Maria Eça de Queirós and Fernando Pessoa), it
is also true that the other type of orientalism—hegemonic, dehumanizing,
prejudicial and racist—has also had a long tradition in these regions. Several
of the essays included in One World
Periphery Reads the Other attest to this other use of orientalism in Latin
America and the Iberian Peninsula.[3]
This volume also addresses other types of orientalism as well as related
approaches. A key concept, for instance, is self-orientalization, in its
diverse filmic, literary, and musical expressions (as we can read in Valesi’s
essay on the western exoticism of the Chinese musical group Twelve Girls Band).
Along these lines, in both Valesi’s and Héctor Hoyos’s essays, we will see how
Occidentalism—that is, the reverse phenomenon of the “Orient”’s othering, demonizing
and inventing the Occident—, also informs and redefines cultural exchanges and
interpretations. Other studies, such as Fellezs’s, examine creolization, a
process by which local cultures and ethnic minorities, even if they are in a
subordinate position, can creatively assign different meanings and uses to
commodities and cultural artifacts they import as a result of global
interconnections. They can create “creolized,” hybrid products and identities
by selecting and fusing heterogenous elements from the adopted
In several texts,
references to these "Oriental" regions, as well as to local
Chinatowns or other “ethnoburbs”
(urban ethnic enclaves) do not reflect direct
experience or knowledge, but have been mediated by idées reçues from
previous readings. At times, texts and films that, in a cursory reading, seem
to continue the Orientalist tradition of manipulative appropriation,
exoticization, essentialism and reductionism, simply respond to a
self-conscious and parodical play on superficial decodifications of clichés. In
a closer reading, one can realize that these authors make clear, from the onset
of the narrative, that this lighthearted defamiliarization, with all its
essentialized caricatures and stereotypes about the “typically oriental” (the
“fictive orientalism” in the title of Paula Park’s essay), have little or
nothing to do with the real-life “Orient.” Rather than claiming to be to the
product of Sinologist research, these representational practices approach the
East from a ludic standpoint that disregards verisimilitude. In fact, they
often echo a situated knowledge of “South-South” dynamics between formerly
colonized peoples.
On the other hand, several essays
study the authors,’ filmmakers,’ and musicians’ admiration and even emulation
of Asian cultures: Latin American
authors who imitate the haiku, Chilean films that imitate Hong Kong martial
arts films, and so on. In all these
cultural borrowings, as well as in others, instead of romanticizing,
fetishizing or exoticizing Asian cultural production (although it would not be
too far-fetched to argue that they may be commodifying it), they simply
incorporate, from a position of respect and sometimes even veneration, their
impressive cultural achievements to their own local traditions. In my view, it
would be absurd, for example, to argue that Tablada’s imitation of the Japanese
haikai is a “hegemonic act of
oppression”; on the contrary, it responds to a sincere will to understand
(rather than control and manipulate) the “Oriental” Other or to a desire for
“humanistic enlargement of horizons” (Said xix).
Other cultural
artifacts under discussion also reflect an awareness of the effects of
globalization. The transnational export and import of culture is, of
course, affected by economic and political developments. Fear of cultural imperialism or a global monoculture
(not only the so-called McDonaldization of the world but, increasingly, also of
its Sinicization through global markets), be it
justified or not,[4]
drives expressions of social and racial anxiety at both local and global
scales. The drive for cultural survival in the face of the rapid extinction of
minority languages (and, in some cases, of cultures as well) informs the
feelings of cultural shock, as well as of attraction and rejection for the
Other. At times, this negotiation of cultural difference is eerily reminiscent
of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s arguments in his much-criticized
theory of the Clash of Civilizations; that is, that after the fall of
communism, “civilizations” have replaced nations and ideologies as the
driving force in today’s volatile global politics, and that cultural and religious identities will inevitably be the
source of armed conflict in the future.
While Said focused on the
perceptions and stereotypes of the Near East “Oriental” in England, France and
the United States, most of these essays study the decentering interplay between
“peripheral” areas of the Third World, “semiperipheral” areas (Spain and
Portugal since the second part of the seventeenth century), and marginalized
social groups of the globe (Chicanos, African Americans, and Filipino
Americans). We see, for example, how China and the Far East in general are
imagined and represented in Latin America and the Caribbean. Sometimes these
“peripheral” areas and social groups talk back to the metropolitan centers of
the former empires or look for their mediation, while others they avoid the
interference of the First World or of hegemonic social groups altogether in
order to address other “peripheral” peoples directly, thus creating rich
“South-South” cross-cultural flows and exchanges.
The main difference
between the imperialistic orientalism studied by Said and this other type of global cultural interaction is that while, in their engagement with the “Orient,” they
may be reproducing certain imperialistic fantasies and mental structures,
typically there is not an ethnocentric process of self-idealization or an
attempt to demonstrate cultural, ontological, or racial superiority in
“South-South” intellectual and cultural exchanges. This way to de-center
or to “provincialize” Europe—pace Dipesh Chakrabarty—disrupts the traditional
center-periphery dichotomy, bringing about multiple and interchangeable centers
and peripheries, whose cultures interact with one another without the mediation
of the European and North American metropolitan centers. As Chakrabarty puts
it, “European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping
us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western
nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this
thought—which is now everybody’s heritage and which affects us all—may be
renewed from and for the margins” (16).
Some of these essays, therefore,
challenge the inevitable “centrality” of Europe, proposing new transmodern,
intercultural paradigms. As Enrique Dussel explains, “The Eurocentric view
reflects on the problem of the crisis of modernity solely with the
European-North American moments (or now even Japanese), but it minimizes the
periphery. To break through this ‘reductive fallacy’ is not easy” (17-18). The
Eurocentric paradigm claims that the phenomenon of modernity is exclusively
European; it developed, according to them, in the Middle Ages and then expanded
to the rest of the world. Against this model, Dussel presents a planetary- or
world-system from which Europe, having been itself the periphery for centuries
(the centers being in Bagdag, China, India and other civilizations), became the
center at one point thanks to the incorporation of the American territories as
their periphery. He proposes, therefore, a transmodern liberation that emerges
from the periphery to transcend a Western modernity that he considers simply as
a “rational management of the [Western] world-system” (19). Dussel argues for
recouping what is redeemable in modernity, a “‘civilizing’ system that has come
to an end” (19), and halting “the practices of domination and exclusion in the
world-system. It is a project of liberation of a periphery negated from the
very beginning of modernity” (19). The aforementioned essays echo this proposed
encouragement of transmodern, inter-(semi)peripheral, and South-South cultural
dialogues, which claim their own place beyond the traditional Western modernity
that had excluded previously them.
Works Cited
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing
Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference. Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton UP, 2000.
Chow, Rey. Ethics
after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ehtnicity-Reading. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1998.
Dussel, Enrique D. “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World System
and the Limits of
Modernity.” The
Cultures of Globalization. Ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao
Miyoshi. Durham, North Carolina Duke UP, 1998.
---. “Transmodernity and interculturality: An Interpretation from the
Perspective of
Philosophy
of Liberation.” Mexico
City: Universidad Autónoma de México-Iz, 2005.
http://www.enriquedussel.org/txt/Transmodernity%20and%20Interculturality.pdf,
accessed 25 August, 2011.
---. “Transmodernidad e interculturalidad (Interpretación desde la Filosofía de
la Liberación)”
UAM-Iz., Mexico City, 2005.
http://www.afyl.org/transmodernidadeinterculturalidad.pdf,
accessed 25 August, 2011.
Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing post-colonial studies and paradigms of
political-economy:
Transmodernity, decolonial thinking, and
global coloniality.” Transmodernity 1.1
(2011):
1-37.
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k6t3fq#page-1,
accessed 24 Aug. 2011.
Huntington, Samuel P. The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Kushigian, Julia A. Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition. In Dialogue with
Borges, Paz, and Sarduy. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1991.
López-Calvo, Ignacio, ed. Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond.
Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.
---. One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the "Oriental" in
the Americas and the
Iberian
Peninsula. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2009.
---.
Peripheral Transmodernities: South-to-South Dialogues between
the Luso-Hispanic World and "the Orient." Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2012.
---.
Transmodernity:
Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World. http://escholarship.org/uc/ssha_transmodernity
Said, Edward.
Orientalism. New York: Vintage
Books, 1978.
[1] “Una
futura cultura trans-moderna, que asume los momentos positivos de la Modernidad
(pero evaluados con criterios distintos desde otras culturas milenarias),
tendrá una pluriversidad rica y será fruto de un auténtico diálogo
intercultural, que debe tomar claramente en cuenta las asimetrías existentes”
(17).
[2] “mutua liberación de las culturas universales
postcoloniales” (15).
[3] For additional cases, see, for example,
the first volume, Alternative
Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond, my monograph Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture, or my
forthcoming articles “Latin America and the Caribbean
in a Sinophone Studies Reader?,” “Los japoneses en la obra de Mario Vargas
Llosa,” and “Refugiados y Asalto al Paraíso de Marcos
Aguinis: apropiaciones y reapropiaciones del discurso palestino.”
[4]
Contrary to common belief, Joana Breidenbach’s and Ina Zukrigl’s ethnographic
work claims that, rather than homogenizing world cultures, globalization has
had a diversifying effect.
[1] Most of
the ideas presented in this paper were previously published in the
introductions to the volumes I edited with Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
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