'Orientalism in the age of Trump has no interest in promoting democracy or other “Western values” because these values are no longer believed, or they’re regarded as an inconvenient obstacle to the exercise of power.'@adamshatz @NYRDailyhttps://t.co/k39EipHSUf
— Danny Postel (@DannyPostel) 2019年7月5日
mozuさんがリツイート
Perhaps the most common misunderstanding is that it is “about” the Middle East; on the contrary, it is a study of Western representations of the Arab-Islamic world—of what Said called “mind-forg’d manacles,” after William Blake.
Since the book’s first publication in 1978, “Orientalism” has become one of those words that shuts down conversation on liberal campuses, where no one wants to be accused of being “Orientalist” any more than they want to be called racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic.
Orientalism is a work of intellectual history, based on readings of an enormous range of literary and scholarly texts. But, in essence, its thesis can be distilled to the proposition that Orientalism is, in Said’s words, “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient‘ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’” He did not say that Orientalist depictions of the West’s Other were merely fictions.
The problem with Orientalism was not that it was false in some crudely empirical sense, rather that it was part of a discursive system of “power-knowledge,” a phrase Said borrowed from Foucault. And the aim of Orientalism as a system of representations, sometimes explicit, more often implicit, was to produce an Other, the better to secure the stability and supremacy of the Western self.
Orientalism, in Said’s description, is a discourse of the powerful about the powerless, an expression of “power-knowledge” that is at the same time an expression of narcissism. The syndrome is very much in evidence today. Orientalism is a foreign ambassador in an Arab city belittling popular concern about Palestine and depicting Arabs as a docile mass who only woke up in 2011, during the Arab revolts, and then reverted to being a disappointment to a benevolent West that merely seeks to be a good tutor. It is a Western “expert” reducing Islamist terrorism in Europe to a psychology of ressentiment, without bothering to explain why European citizens of Muslim origin might feel alienated, then telling an Arab critic of the Westerner’s work that he is being emotional for objecting to a presentation purely based on scientific data, and finally flying into a rage at being misunderstood by this stubborn Oriental.
Under President Obama, the grip of Orientalism appeared to relax. Obama made it clear, at first, that he did not intend to dictate to, but to cooperate with the Arab-Islamic world, and he made welcome gestures toward Iran and the ending of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But even the message of his famous Cairo address in 2009 was filtered through an Orientalist prism, albeit a more liberal, multicultural one. Not a few listeners in the region wished that he had addressed them as citizens of their respective countries rather than as Muslims—not only because some of them were Christians or atheists, but because religion is but one marker of identity, and not always the most pertinent one.
If the uprisings demolished the Orientalist myth that religion is a uniquely determining force in the Arab-Islamic world, however, they also encouraged and flattered another Orientalist fantasy: namely, that Middle Easterners simply want to be like “us,” that Anglo-American liberalism is the natural telos of human societies and that Middle Eastern “difference” is an aberration that will eventually dissolve, with help from Facebook and Google.
The knowledge collected by Western explorers and spies was hardly disinterested: it underwrote colonization, wars of conquest, and “humanitarian” intervention. Yet this Orientalism preferred to recast the West’s violent conquests as consensual interactions: seductions, not rapes
Politically speaking, it was often liberal, republican, and secular—based, at least in principle, on winning hearts and minds, on assimilating the Other to Western democratic values
Orientalism in the age of Trump has no interest in promoting democracy or other “Western values” because these values are no longer believed, or they’re regarded as an inconvenient obstacle to the exercise of power. This new Orientalism speaks in the language of deals and, more often, that of force and repression. It keeps Arab despots in power and angry young men of Arab origin in prison.
The Orientalism of today, the Orientalism of Fox News, Bat Ye’or’s “Eurabia,” and Steve Bannon, is an Orientalism based not on tendentious scholarship but on an absence of scholarship. Its Eurocentrism, which feeds off the idea that Europe is under threat from Muslim societies and other shit-hole countries, is an undisguised conspiracy theory.
Trump’s anti-Muslim racism is unprecedented for an American president, but it is hardly unique elsewhere.
The Western self, produced by this contemporary Orientalism, is not a liberal who measures his or her freedom or reason by the absence, or weakness, of those concepts in the East. Instead, he is an aggrieved, besieged white man standing his ground, with his finger on the trigger, against the barbarians who have made it through the gates. He is not Lawrence of Arabia, or even the Quiet American; he is Dirty Harry.
Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience.” If the “global war on terror” has taught us anything over the last seventeen years and more, it is that the road to barbarism begins with this failure.
「東洋人はあああ」とか馬鹿の一つ覚えのように東洋人を十把一絡げに一般化し、東洋人を野蛮で変人、東洋は奇怪で遅れた文明国だと表象することで、自分たちは偉いんだという地位を確保してきたオリエンタリスト、欧州中心主義者たちーー以前は、リベラルな外面をつけて、「あんたら、私らのようになりたいんやろ、教えてやるよ、西洋ではあああ！、こういうものやねん、おまいらもおれらのようになりなはれ、おれらに同化したらええねん」みたいなことを言って、他者化した東洋を馬鹿にし、侵略してきたが、トランプの時代になってリベラルの外面も外して、露骨な人種主義、の本性をあらわにしてきた、と。
「東洋人」のところを「日本人」、「東洋」を「日本」に置き換えると、この記事は、オウベイ出羽守についてもたいていあてはまるね。
