The proposed panel brings together scholars working across comparative literary contexts to explore the following questions: How has Orientalism facilitated or restricted certain modes of transmission, translation, or exchange since its historical beginnings in Europe? What is gained by considering Orientalism as a network, economy, or ecosystem, in addition to thinking of it as a structure for the production and dissemination of knowledge, as Edward Said defined it? How can Orientalism's legacies be rethought by examining a wider archive of textual, visual, or linguistic objects than those traditionally associated with Orientalist scholarship and writing? The proposed panel will include five papers that explore these questions through innovative and topical approaches to examining understudied archival materials, inter-imperial networks, and the politics and histories of translation. The papers will range in historical coverage, moving from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present day.
[1] The panel's opening paper raises vital conceptual questions through close readings of Butrus al-Bustani, Marx, and Locke. It explores how Orientalism advances a particular sense of the world--a sense opened up through the figure of the property-owning, literate, and temporally coherent subject.
[2] A second paper draws evidence from inter-imperial print networks central to the foundations of Orientalism and Islamic studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It considers how relational notions of 'ajami (or non-Arab) "racial" difference presented translational challenges for foundational Orientalist figures with implications for Orientalism's legacies within the fields of world literature and comparative, postcolonial studies.
[3] The third paper explores agonistic elements, productive tensions, and underexamined conjunctions within Edward Said's work on Orientalist philology and humanist philology. On these grounds, it reassesses the possibility of a radical, critical practice conceived through Said's legacy as a dislocation of authority, a vocation that compels critics to engage with an open-ended historical examination of the political present.
[4] The fourth paper examines implicit modes of Orientalist thought that shape the translation of Arabic literature into English in the contemporary U.S. Arguing against facile celebrations of a so-called boom in Arabic-to-English literary translations in the new millennium, it identifies an ethical problematic in the familiar reception of such texts among U.S. anglophone audiences.
[5] A final paper proposes a materialist critique of Orientalist infrastructure in Morocco, considering its relationship to forms of writing, mobility, and sovereignty that both enable and disable contemporary communication networks.
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Dr. Anna Ziajka Stanton
This paper examines critically the Orientalism of the networks that enable Arabic literature to reach anglophone audiences in translation in the United States today. Beginning from Edward Said’s axiomatic 1990 diagnosis of Arabic literature as “embargoed” from the U.S. literary field, I argue that since then a far more complex picture has emerged of the conditions within which Arabic literary texts circulate in the U.S. in English translation. Over a period marked by two U.S.-led wars in Iraq, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and an exponential growth in the number of Americans learning Arabic for reasons both personal and professional, the networks that connect Arabic literary texts and anglophone readers have become denser and more intimate. I focus on the changing role of the Arabic-to-English translator in the U.S. context as an indexical figure for such shifts. I propose that if this translator has conventionally been seen, per Said, as bearing an ethical burden of representing the Arab other to an Orientalist American public--as described by Roger Allen (2010, 2015), Marilyn Booth (2008, 2010), and Michelle Hartman (2012, 2015)--then she or he now translates for an American readership to whom the Arab Middle East is always already comprehended as familiar: knowable via social media and cable news, through the academic study of its languages, history, and contemporary geopolitics, or through firsthand experience. Contra facile celebrations of what Waïl Hassan has called an “unprecedented boom in literary translation from Arabic,” what new (perhaps unacknowledged) forms of Orientalism are produced, reified, and transmitted within or alongside such apparent knowledge? What ethical obligations fall upon a translator today who must contend not with perceptions of Arabic literature’s foreignness, but of its familiarity? Said and the critics who have followed in his footsteps offer incisive paradigms for thinking translation ethics as a problem of self and other; yet, what new approaches are required to theorize the ethics of translating Arabic literature into English in the United States in 2020? How have present-day translators contested Orientalist modes of reception by emphasizing not the difference of the Arabic source text, but its aesthetics, literariness, and formal linguistic effects?
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The proposed paper re-examines evidence from several print-platforms and inter-imperial print networks central to the foundations of Orientalism and Islamic studies in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. In the process, it considers how the relational notion of ‘ajami (or non-Arab) “racial” difference presented translational challenges for foundational Orientalist figures like Ernest Renan (in his work on comparative philology), Ignaz Goldziher (in his foundational Muslim Studies), and the Dutch Islamicist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (whose proto-sociological work helped to establish, along with Goldizher, “Arab-Islamic” studies as an Orientalist sub-discipline in Europe). By re-tracing how Renan translated notions of ‘ajami difference, for example, into “Aryan” difference, or how Goldziher and Snouck Hurgronje attached 19th century European epistemes (like “national consciousness” and “racial pride”) to historical and contemporary ‘ajami-‘arabi dynamics, this paper suggests how Orientalism foundationally evolved through inter-imperial debates on the translation of “Oriental diversities.” On this basis, the paper ultimately argues that this translational issue may offer the grounds for under-examined, transregional critiques of Orientalism’s legacies within the fields of world literature and comparative, post-colonial studies, in ways that conjoin counter-imperial writing from within and beyond the nominal “Middle East.”
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Prof. Veli N. Yashin
Edward Said’s engagement with philology, throughout his ouevre, is repeatedly elaborated through both an intimate and agonistic posture. Rather than identifying a contradiction between Said's critique of Orientalist philology and his defense of, or repeated return to, humanist philology, as some of earlier critics and more recent detractors have done, I argue instead that this recurrent conjunction forms a constant and productive tension in his work, which hardly warrants a facile distinction between, say, Orientalism and Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Said's return to philology in late style in this sense is paradigmatic as a final philological work that doesn't allow for a simple closure or resolution. This inextricable tension makes it possible for Said to expatriate, from the discriminations and constraints of philological discipline, the possibility of a radical practice, a future philology and points to what an earlier boundary 2 issue identified as "the work of the critic": an open-ended, potentially interminable, dislocation of authority, a vocation or calling that compels a critical and historical examination of the political present.
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Prof. David Fieni
This paper engages in a materialist critique of Orientalist infrastructure in Morocco, considering its relationship to modes of writing, mobility, and sovereignty that both enable and disable contemporary communication networks. In particular, I will explore how mobile telecommunications condition the way that users of cell phones occupy local space, even as these technologies are underwritten by global finance capital. Such networks trace and retrace grids established by Orientalist actors (the post office, out of which Maroc Telecom emerged, appeared in 1913, in the second year of the French Protectorate). The palimpsest of infrastructures in Morocco demonstrates how the knowledge about a place that Orientalism produced also engineered ways of distributing this knowledge that both left tangible traces in that place and preordained ways of using it. The term “nomad telephony” tests Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of nomadology while also cutting sharply against their theorization’s anthropological assumptions. This paper also examines unorthodox uses of mobile technology in a variety of contexts, from Amazigh shepherds in the High Atlas mountains linked through cell phones, to literary effects producing a détournement of both technological and literary networks. Critical interlocutors include RA Judy, Tarek El-Ariss, and Edward Said.
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Mr. Jeffrey Sacks
This paper offers a reading of Butrus al-Bustani to consider the formation and transformation of two distinct terms in the Arabic nineteenth century: the “social” and the “world.” The appearance of the “social” in al-Bustani is linked to a quite particular sense of the body, and the corporeal, because it is only when the world appears as a space in which the social is a distinct field for the ordering of beings—it is only when the social is distinguished from the ethical, the linguistic, and, one might also say, the poetic—that something like a “world,” in the modern sense, can appear at all. This paper will offer a close reading of al-Bustani—in “Khitab fi al-hay’a al-ijtima‘iyya” and in his Arabic-language translation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—in relation to Marx (in Vol.1 of Capital) and Locke (in the Second Treatise of Government), to draw out the sense of the social al-Bustani advances. I wish to argue that if this advance is a particular version of orientalism—if it is orientalism as a social, and if also linguistic, form in the colonies—this sense of what the social is generates, equally, a new sense of the world. Orientalism, one might further say, is a particular sense of the world—a sense opened up through the figure of the property-owning, literate, and temporally coherent subject. And yet if this sense extends itself on a global scale in European colonialism—formal and informal, with and without the jackboots, as Ranajit Guha had it—the translation of these forms in the languages of colonized is equally an occasion for thinking not so much the acceptance or rejection of these forms but their disorder, which is to say—and the reading I’ll offer will try to trace nothing less than this—the fundamental discombobulation of terms, their anoriginary difference and dislocation in relation to themselves. Al-Bustani’s “discourse on the social body” or, one might also say, on “social form” is equally a discourse that harbors a disorder, a rebellion and an insurgency against the forms al-Bustani privileges, and which the coming decolonization—and this is a decolonization that we may also read in al-Bustani—will give to us as a different, and quite other sense of relation, if also—and what could be more urgent, today, and in al-Bustani’s time?—of the world.
