From Orientalism…

to Cosmopolitanism…

From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism:

A Rigid Logic: East v. West

AAzar Nafisi (b.1955) (b.1955)

Readers Unite!  Earning high acclaim, the book spent over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.  Reading Lolita in Tehran has been translated into 32 languages, and has won diverse literary awards.  (White, Laurie.

A And where now? Azar Nafisi is the executive director of the SAIS Dialogue Project at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies… …where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature.

Reading in the Progressive, Continuous Tense: a verb in the progressive, continuous tense.  Reading is something we DO, or are always DOING.  We change the texts we read, by the way we read, and perhaps by where we read.  Reading also happens TO us –what we read changes us; we are co-authored in return.

Every Foreign Literature course needs: an articulated theory of difference a non-universalizing theory of similarities

ProblemSolution OrientalismCosmopolitanism Students need: 1) a theory about why misreading happens  2) a radicalized theory of reading IDENTIFICATION

American Orientalism?

The Disney-fication of China? -- see Sheng-Mei Ma

Our most entrenched (least examined) prejudice, since 9/11: ISLAMOPHOBIA a fear, or suspicion of Islam

Edward Said ( ) A Palestinian- American academic, Said published his most influential work, Orientalism in 1978.

Orientalism: What the West needed the East to Be

In his words, “Orientalism” defined:  “Orientalism is a generic term…to describe the Western approach to the Orient; Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning…But in addition, I have been using the word to designate that collection of dreams, images, and vocabularies available to anyone who has tried to talk about what lies east of the dividing line.”(73)

A History of Projection: Willful Mis-readings Guilty Binaries: WESTVs. EAST  Reason/Rationality  Science  Enlightened Individual  Work of the Mind  Masculine Agency  Faith/Irrationality  Religion  Brainwashed Collective  Pleasures of the Body  Feminine Passivity

Too Rigid a Geography of Self?  “no identity can ever exist by itself…without an array of opposites, negatives, and oppositions” ( 52).

Kwame Appiah (b.1954) British-born American philosopher, novelist, and scholar of African and of African American studies, best known for his contributions to the philosophy of culture.

Ethics in a World of Strangers In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992) Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1996). The Ethics of Identity (2005) Cosmopolitanism (2006)

Citizens of the Cosmos The Cynics of 4 th Century B.C. Athens: cynical about local norms: the familiar or parochial Welcomed the foreign, the variety of the cosmos!

Anticipating Similarity “ Engagement with strangers is always…engagement with particular strangers; and the warmth that comes from shared identity will often be available” (Ethics 98). --Appiah

Are you a local-yokel or a cosmopolitan?  Do you trust the familiar…and distrust the unfamiliar?  Or do you turn your skepticism towards the familiar, looking for influence from elsewhere?

One of the goals of Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: is to “make it harder [for his readers] to think of the world as divided between the West and the Rest; between locals and moderns; between a bloodless ethic of profit and a bloody ethic of identity; between “us” and “them.”’

Pheng Cheah, UC Berkely Cosmopolitics, Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (1998) Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (2006).

The Problem with Synonyms Cosmopolitanism = Globalization? Multi-culturalism?

Contact/Cross-Contamination! A Swahili Grave Egyptian Instrument

Inner Tensions No match for LITERATURE! Universal concernRespect Differences …identification between reader and character presumes some universal grounds first for concern. “Take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives” (Appiah 112).

“The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism” ] By Roksana Bahramitash What’s the definition of “feminist orientalism”? Individuals from the Occident feeling superior to their repressed Oriental sisters, in the name of a one-size-fits-all western feminism.

“The Other” We expect them to read in ways as uniform as the two veiled faces on the cover, modestly diverting their gaze.

our ability to experience the appeal of a given value… CON: materialism PRO: American dream = Immigrant’s dream

Nafisi paraphrases Theodor Adorno: “most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home” (94).

How individuated, or collective, an activity is reading?

“I know what it means to be caught between tradition and change”

Said Discovers a Cosmopolitan: The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. Hugo of St. Victor, 12 century monk

Manna, the voice of the Epilogue: Five years have passed since the time when the story began in a cloud-lit room where we read Madame Bovary and had chocolate from a wine-red dish on Thursday mornings. Hardly anything has changed in the nonstop sameness of our everyday life. But somewhere else I have changed.

“The Poet” continues: Each morning with the rising of the routine sun as I wake up and put on my veil before the mirror to go out and become a part of what is called reality, I also know of another “I” that has become naked on the pages of a book: in a fictional world, I have become fixed like a Rodin statue…

A call to read and be read! …And so I will remain as long as you keep me in your eyes, dear readers (343).

Wikipedia Entry: Ugly American Photo by Constantine Arias Argentina, 1958

Are some people(s) somehow less legible than others?

“I see...”: the I and the EYE

Two parables about learning to SEE, learning to READ, cross- culturally.