We are thankful to the Chinese for the long, quiet, soothing and uniform streets, where house after house stands blue and modest in a still blue row, and where each holds and acknowledges the other, at least as fine and as discrete as in Paris. We are thankful to the English for the wide, beautiful, clean and comfortable pathways, the graceful garden precincts, and the wonderful tree plantations, which are perhaps the most beautiful in all Singapore.
HERMANN HESSE1
In 1911, at the age of thirty-four, Hesse traveled across South-East Asia and India. While this may have been some typical act of European bourgeois fascination or rite-of-passage in the Orient, these travels had special resonance for him, as his grandparents had served on a Protest Mission earlier in the previous century, his mother having been born there in 1842. The musings, recollections, and essays of his travels have the shared characteristic of needing to find a penetrating and sympathetic insight, although lapses were inevitable.
As someone in almost perpetual transit, Hesse alighted upon the way in which the towns, ports, and cities he visited were diverse, always in flux, and a confluence of influences that belied strict generalization. In one of his travelogues he observes the wayward course of cultural authorship in the manufacture of textiles. In this quotation he is writing from Singapore, a nexus of many cultures, and an early example of what we today call a multicultural nation. He sees
beautiful, dark, noble-looking people in the very same screaming, bright, relentlessly motley costumes, much like local masked balls given by young, spirited shop assistants—true caricatures of local costume! The smart merchants from our West have made Indian silks and linens dispensable by dyeing cotton and printing calico much brighter, more Indian, more gay, wilder, more pungent [giftiger], than had before been seen in Asia, and the good Indians together with the Malaysians become welcome customers and carry on their bronzed hips the cheap, lurid [farbengrellen] fabrics from Europe. Ten of these Indian figures are enough to make a populous street stir with color, in one go turning it into an inauthentic “Orient”.2
This is more than just economic imperialism at work. The English found they had to adapt and deploy their own economy or otherwise be at the whims of overseas markets. And one would have to read more of Hesse’s travelogues and observations to palliate what here reads as traditional imperialist snobbishness and superiority. There are two things to be gleaned from this passage at this stage, and that is not only the accurate observation that the Orient has the Orient sold back to them—much as China is now selling the West back to the West.
The second is the slip of calling the Orient “inauthentic,” a point that is elucidated in an essay from shortly afterward, entitled “Singapore Dream” in which he dilates on the amorphousness of the Orient, which is a symbol of captivation and escape. In this case the word is “Asia”: “Asia was not a part of the world but rather a very specific yet mysterious place, somewhere between India and China. From there was the wellspring of cultures; from there were the roots of all of humankind and the dark wellspring of life; there stand the images of Gods and the tablets of law.”3
It was Hesse who was one of the leading figures to make the Orient mean for the West a passage of self-discovery, in which authenticity is spiritual and ethical rather than material. His Siddhartha (1922), a German language parable mirroring the story of Buddha, would become to the hippie and yippie generation of the late 1960s and the 1970s what Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1891) was for troops of the First World War, a rally to conduct and action, a tract that promised to salvation through perseverance and self-transformation. But more compellingly, Hesse also reached audiences in India and other parts of the “Orient.” These twists, in which authenticity occurs across cultures, are at the crux of what can be called transorientalism.
It was at about the same time as Hesse’s popularity flourished in the United States and other Anglophone cultures that Edward Said began working on his critique of the Western observer’s colonization of the East. Since his groundbreaking and still debated book, Orientalism (1978), “Orientalism” has had a decidedly problematic ring. Said emphasized that colonization occurred both physically and mentally. The compelling nature of this hold is that of what Said calls authority, and “authority must in large part be the subject of any description of Orientalism.”4 In Said’s persuasive hands, colonial countries—primarily Britain and France—are responsible for shaping negative and limiting images that have affected whole modes of thought, policies, and the colonized themselves. Orientalism began as a philological and archaeological field of study in Europe and evolved in America after the Second World War into “attitudes of cultural hostility.”5
Said’s words sound like a prophetic philosophical template for recent events, such as when, on November 8, 2016, the newly inaugurated President of the United States, Donald Trump, sought to place a ban on Muslim countries deemed a national security risk, a measure affecting over 200 million people, and placing all manner of people in confusion and peril. The proscription was blocked, but the egregiousness of the attempt had immeasurable effects. History can be written as a narrative of the way borders are enforced and expanded, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, such a dramatic stance in the name of national security by the self-proclaimed leader of the democratic world, the nominal upholder of liberal values,6 was shocking not only for its violence but for what would ramify from it. It was above all an unequivocal sign that Islam, but also the “Orient,” continued to be a locus of alarm as much as it had always been of fascination. Trump’s edicts were also very much in a venerable vein of anxiety over the “Orient” that conflated geography with unverifiable, unqualifiable generalizations about whole social groups. But while it had much in common with extremist xenophobia and brash Fuhrerprinzip authoritarianism, the more different and nuanced conditions remain obscure, as they do with actions that appear so clear-mindedly simple.
Although the evidence for upholding Said’s notion of the power for the Orient is compelling, where Trump’s jaundiced position is just one among many—including the mass hysteria over refugees from Syria, Libya, and many more besides—its breadth of critique tends to be as limited as those of the ideological extremists it deplores. This is not to say that Said’s message is not without its merits, far from it. It is a message that places a writer like Hesse as one who plunders the East, expresses his veneration for its ways, yet returns to the comforts of his home in safe and salubrious Switzerland. Said would later temper his position in Culture and Imperialism (1993) in light of revisionist cultural perspectives, many of which pledged their debt to his earlier work. As a result also of changes in contemporary history (the book was published after Perestroika for example), Said reflects that, “For the first time, the history of imperialism and its culture can now be studied as neither monolithic not reductively compartmentalized, separate, distinct.”7 Said goes on to acknowledge the “separatist and chauvinistic” discourses of countries such as India and Lebanon, but argues that these are salutary expressions of the need to escape domination.8 (How one would apply this argument to fundamentalist movements such as ISIS, despite the responsibility of the United States in abetting them, would be much harder to formulate.) At the end of the introduction, Said states that he writes from the United States as a Palestinian educated in the West. He admits: “Ever since I can remember, I have felt that I belonged to both worlds, without being completely of either one or the other. During my lifetime, however, the parts of the Arab world that I was most attached to either have been changed utterly by civil upheavals and war, or have simply ceased to exist.”9 In his “Reflections on Exile,” Said calls on the twelfth-century Saxon monk, Hugo of St Victor: “the man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.”10
The new perspective of Said, and the subsequent generations of the newly formed discipline of postcolonial theory, can perhaps be encapsulated by parsing the second sentence and replacing “however” with a word like “furthermore” and “moreover,” for the “however” insists on a kind of essentialism whose contours are more and more eroded.11 This changed perspective is eloquently and poignantly summarized by the Nigerian-born New York-based writer Teju Cole in his essay on James Baldwin:
I disagree not with his particular sorrow but with the self-abnegation that pinned him to it. Bach, so profoundly human, is my heritage, I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait. I care for them more than some white people do, just as some white people care more for aspects of African art than I do.12
He acknowledges such shifts in attitude as residual from the sorrow of Baldwin (or Said’s anxiety). It is as if his own sense of balance is an after-effect of their suffering, a suffering that had to transpire against the backdrop of turpitude. He is content to embrace multiple worlds with equanimity:
There is no world in which I would surrender the intimidating beauty of Yoruba-language poetry for, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets, or one in which I’d prefer chamber orchestras playing baroque music to the koras of Mali. I’m happy to own all of it. This carefree confidence is, in part, the gift of time. It is a dividend of the struggle of people from earlier generations. I feel little alienation in museums, full though they are with other people’s ancestors.13
Such deliberations are far from unique, but rather encompass a new contemporary social, racial, and ethical standard, what Cole elsewhere calls “in-betweenness.”14 Instead of being outside, it is one of belonging to the fold of more than one place or idea.
In a similar vein, Chinua Achebe, writing about postcolonial writer’s use of English, also quotes Baldwin and his “quarrel with English.” Baldwin saw himself as a conduit, an imitator of a language not truly his own. To this, Achebe counters: “Baldwin’s problem is not exactly mine, but I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it would have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.”15 More than any language, not only in its susceptibility to idiom, but because of the colonial dominance of Britain, there is more than one English, and the many global literatures can attest to that.
Thus Cole’s comfortable in-betweenness and Achebe’s contented “communion” of his identity in the language of another are a site of activity and belonging different from that of the downhearted exile. Unlike their predecessors, their belonging is not experienced as a yawning, consuming crevasse, but contrarily as a place of mobility. That does not mean that there are not still exiles cut from similar cloth as Said, as there are many. It is simply to state that race and identity have more moving parts than ever before, and Said’s example can be used as a marker within a landscape that has more than one horizon.
The word “transorientalism” is one that I coined in my book Fashion and Orientalism16 for precisely these manifold circumstances, to get out of the more binary logic of Orient and Occident, as well as the opprobrium and guilt that subtends from the word “Orient.” It provides for the mobility of identity and anticipates the shifting boundaries. Said ventures into this territory when he states that he cannot “condone” reactionary positions that, for example, “require Arabs to read Arab books, use Arab methods, and the like. As C. L. R. James used to say, Beethoven belongs as much to West Indians as he does to Germans, since his music is not part of the human heritage.”17 But when Cole confesses to feeling perfectly at home in foreign worlds, without guilt or hesitation, then a new dimension has been reached altogether.
Yet the diverse channels in which ownership is forfeited to the softer term of influence come at a price. For ownership belongs to belonging, and the securities that that may bring. Just before his death in 2003, Said confessed: “I still have not been able to understand what it means to have a country.”18 As Tony Judt avers, it is ironic that the intellectual that upheld and represented such strong views about reclaiming sovereignty against the perennial failure of Euro-America to understand the fate of colonialized and diasporic nations should himself have such heterogeneous and displaced origins. For
Edward Said lived all his life at a tangent to the various causes with which he was associated. The involuntary “spokesman” for the overwhelmingly Muslim Arabs of Palestine was an Episcopalian Christian, born in 1935 to a Baptist from Nazareth. The uncompromising critic of imperial condescension was educated in some of the last of the colonial schools that had trained the indigenous elite of the European empires; for many years he was more at ease in English and French than in Arabic and an outstanding exemplar of Western education with which he could never fully identify.19
An empirical, materialist logic of common sense would have the opposite. That is, the best defenders, the best witnesses of a cause are those with the most authentic relationship to it, its language and its lore. But what if the opposite was just as true? And what if this condition, while always existing as an outlier in the endlessly protean re-shaping of discourse that is the life of languages and civilizations, is especially pertinent to what Judt calls “the age of displaced persons,”20 but also the age of multi-layered and multiple identities effected by globalization?
It is the contradictions at the heart of Said’s own conditions that require definition as no longer an exception but something more substantive. Hence “transnationalism” is a word, married to the idea of globalization, germane to the abstractions of identity, and the name for cross-cultural exchange on a social, economic, and political level. Philosophically, it is leveled at those people that Judt, commenting on Said, calls “always at a slight tangent to his affinities.” “Transorientalism” is tethered to this notion of exchange—a term that has tended to replace the former one of the West plundering from the Orient—while retaining the more ideological volatile word “Orientalism,” which enshrines presumption with desire for the exotic. It also contends that the gaze is not focused in one direction, for as this book will argue and recount in many ways, the gaze is a double helix or a room of mirrors, no less than when people, most conspicuously artists, designers, and writers, train the gaze on themselves, participating in their own “Orientalisation” usually in places outside of their assumed identity. Or they can have mixed identity: the late literary and cultural theorist, Ihab Hassan would frequently announce during his public lectures that he could speak several languages, all with a foreign accent.21 “For identification,” notes Homi Bhabha, “identity is never an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality.”22 Globalization, over-population, recurring major refugee crises, mounting ecological threat—including to social ecologies—have brought the nature of the “problematic process of access” unerringly to the fore.
Before the age of naval travel and exploration from the late fifteenth century, still less from an overpopulated populated and digital world, the lines of ethnicity were, relatively speaking, much easier to define. Migrant, émigré, or exile, the notions of having been born in one country while residing in another, or of identifying with one country more than another, while mixed up with all the incommensurabilities of human knowledge and experience, were relatively easy to grasp. But once cultural identity is transacted in language, art, design, and other means of communication, then what had existed in a limited sphere of definition now reaches outward into spaces that are well outside borders or the delimitations of physical bodies. For one of the distinguishing features of early modern European culture was the rise of masquerade, and the consciousness that wearing the clothing of the other had a redemptive or transgressive power, harnessing the virtues of the spirit or amplifying the pleasures of the flesh. But it is only very recently that scholars, as well as artists and designers interested in the negotiation of otherness, have come to be conscious of the fluidity of the way identity is represented and asserted. What an individual deems as essential to his or her culture has usually multiple, and often quite irregular, roots. The vicissitudes and back-flips in visual identifiers of race and identity can be very challenging, as they are material examples of the way in which a “stable” cultural identity is really an agglomerate of signs, which, as with any linguistic system, are in the constant process of modification and change. This is no different from basic subjectivity: the idea of a stable individual self is in fact constituted by change itself. Claims to cultural orientation always occur between the individual representative objects that act as signifiers of inheritance and belonging.
However, it may be astonishing to know that many of these signs originated in places remote from those with which they are associated. Perhaps the most universal example is a souvenir made in China when not a souvenir of China. Well-known examples that spring immediately to mind include: the way that the Tree of Life motif has been claimed alternately by both Indian and Chinese designers; the Willow pattern on ceramics, which was not conceived in China but in the West Midlands of England around 1790; and, most dramatic of all, the case of the pattern we identify as paisley, which derives its name from the Scottish town known for its textile mills where the Indian buta was developed, and which in recent times has been renationalized in India, but heavily inflected by the modifications that it underwent while appropriated in Britain.
Civilizations, and the concepts of nations that subtend from them, define themselves as much according to their rules and qualities as in terms of what they are not. The illusory autonomy of a nation is in fact only made accessible, meaningful, and whole according to its antagonisms, namely foreigners, the generic “Jew,” refugees—what in earlier times were called the barbarians, barbaroi, an inelegant designation for anyone of foreign language and custom.23 Appropriately enough, the word’s current meaning carries a distinctly aggressive connotation. While the period after the Second World War was one of an extraordinarily fluid, and in most cases generous, flow of nationalities, the present era has witnessed an ever-increasing intolerance of migrants, and especially refugees.
With rare exception, it is the nature of nationalism to fight and obscure any signs of unity, when such unity is either a sham or short-lived. This is no better demonstrated in modern times than with the Edward Gibbon’s great and still lasting magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789). In the words of Norman Davies, “Its magnificent narrative demonstrates that the lifespan even of the mightiest states is finite.”24 The mightiest states are finite because cultures are porous. Where they do not perish they are remade. The two most salient examples of this in recent memory are Japan and Turkey. The Meiji era of Japan opened its doors to the rest of the world but in a tactical way, seeking ways of modernizing and superseding a West that they perceived was overtaking them. In this process, half the population, the men, adopted Western dress and what were perceived as other masculine forms of consumption and deportment such as drinking alcohol and smoking cigars. But while the men were largely Westernizing, the women were effectively “re-Orientalized,” encouraged to wear more vivid and flamboyant clothing than they had worn before. It is as if the swiftness of these changes entered into the national pathology which, while clinging sternly to traditions, is also highly adept at responding to modern constructs as in the kawaii (“cute”) phenomenon of the last thirty years or so, and the still growing cult of cosplaying.
But from this more contemporary vantage point of the last thirty or so years, the kinds of transformations that have occurred are harder to place into firm contours because of the many effects of globalization. Japan and Turkey could carry out their reforms because of a still credible and conceivable historical view of what the nation was and had been, its borders (albeit a contested issue in Turkey), its history, and its other constituents. Our time, observes Peter Sloterdijk is “a story of space ‘revolution’ into the homogeneous outside. It undertakes the explication of the Earth, insofar as its inhabitants are capable of grasping, that the categories of what it means to have direct neighbors no longer suffices in order to interpret the nature of living together with other people.”25Sloterdijk describes Marshall McLuhan’s “implosion” of the world but on a much larger and more intricate scale. He also invokes Martin Heidegger’s “Age of the World Picture.”26 In our time the place where we live is just a material necessity for the purpose of gaining access to any number of different places and people. To envisage an open world, however, is different from one without borders, as it is precisely these borders that allow people to make sense of difference as they cross them physically, in cyberspace, or in their imagination.
Yet to see these shifts as neutral or benign is to be thoroughly mistaken and naïve. “Globalization” is a term used unreservedly by politicians, businessmen, and journalists, and usually for the flow of capital. One distinct component of transorientalism is the acknowledgment of peoples who neither know nor care of the ideological issues at stake in postcolonialism, nor have time to pause to do so. The underclasses have no means to cross borders, physically or virtually. Sloterdijk makes the challenging but tenable point that a globalization generates the “Globus” or “globe,” a region of in and out: those who have the privilege to inhabit it and those outside. Globalization is not about the distribution of capital but the opposite, its containment.27 Teju Cole, for all his salutary containment within Western culture and mores, is aware of occupying several cultural positions. He is cognizant of his privileges, is still voluble about racism, and keenly aware of the widening economic and cultural inequities at the heart of globalization: “The genuine hurt of Africa is no fiction.”28 These observations, or convictions, are essential. And while they inhabit the shadows of this book, and for the moment serve to explain the conditions under which “East” and “West” continue to exist, they are not limited to geographic co-ordinates. Rather one stands for “exotic,” the other “prosperous,” one “despotic,” the other “liberal.” On a factual level, to argue for the accuracy of these terms is preposterous, yet they are divisions that in many ways are essential to one another, just as Indigenous and non-Indigenous are in fact the name not so much of a binary but two terms within one method of identity economy.
This means that identity, and how it is expressed in art, is not as easy to locate and we must find new tools and terms of reference with which to discuss it. Cross and dual nationals have of course existed with migration, which became especially noticeable after the World Wars and the Depression of the last century. But there are now altogether new kinds of identities to complement the old virtual identities, and identities that exist across cultures, hence the increasing currency of the term “transnationalism.” An émigré can feel like an exile, such as an Irishman in the early twentieth century who still wholeheartedly considered himself Irish. Then there was the term, popular in the 1980s and 1990s of having a “hyphenated” identity such as Chinese-American or Asian-Australian. More recently the relationship can be better thought of with an ampersand, “&,” wherein identities exist concordantly or parallel to one another, where the individual thinks of him or herself less as a blend or a composite, but as existing in different frameworks at different times. Some of these are material and cultural, or they can be molded through individual will as aliases and invented entities online or as cosplay personas.
Or then there can be a cultural persona that is nourished by another culture—it cannot exist as such except in a different domain. Arguably the most striking visualization and enactment of this is in the case of women artists from the Middle East who live and thrive in London, New York, and elsewhere (Sydney, Paris). At the beginning of the twentieth century—not so long ago—women in developed and “Christian” countries were still discouraged from becoming artists, and the opportunities for studying art were severely hampered by the restrictions on what was deemed acceptable to draw, paint, or sculpt. The nude was out of reach, except perhaps in the form of plaster copies of classical sculptures. Such circumstances on a far more constrained scale pertain in countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Art still exists under the shadow of the traditional Islamic prohibition of sacred imagery, and so for a woman to attempt any kind of image for her own sake is likely to be considered a double blasphemy. Art exists in such places either as historic artifacts, or as investments purchased from the West, but “Contemporary art,” which is supposed to be experimental and critical, is culturally anathema. Middle Eastern women artists living abroad, such as Shirin Neshat and Ghada Amer, both of whom currently reside in New York, are only allowed free expression of their culture in a city remote from it. Another famous example is Mona Hatoum: a Lebanese-born artist who identifies as Palestinian and lives in London. You cannot get more transoriental than that. (There are naturally many other instances that are not confined to the Middle East.) These artists and their work and others will be examined in detail later in the book.
What is also noteworthy is that “East” and “West” are not traditional binary concepts but highly labile terms. It cannot be over-stated that the Orient is a highly incoherent concept that embraces more a feeling than a tangible place. The same can be said to apply to the “Oriental’s” embrace of the West. This latter relationship is gnomically encapsulated by Orhan Pamuk in an essay on André Gide. Here he relates how Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, whom he suggests was the most eminent Turkish writer to have admired Gide in his lifetime, expressed elation when Gide won the Nobel Prize in 1947. Tanpinar’s response, Pamuk explains,
can be better understood if we remember that the Westernizing intellectual depends on an ideal of the West rather than the West itself. Even if he is someone who regrets the loss of traditional culture, the old music and poetry, and the “sensitivity of former generations,” a Westernized intellectual like Tampinar can only criticize his own culture and can only move from a conservative nationalism to a creative modernity to the extent that he clings to a fairy-tale image of an ideal Europe or the West. At the very least, this grip allows him to open up an inspiring and critical new space between the two.29
The observation at the end of this statement is crucial, as it destabilizes any belief in cultural autonomy, and instead recognizes that although the West had been held as a kind of gold standard of culture, it was through the coupling of the two, and the difficulties involved in such a coupling, that new ideas and entities could emerge. While accounting for the many imbalances—perceptual, economic, aesthetic, and more besides—between cultures, it is this “third term,” which is continually being reborn, that is the focus of this book. These spaces are not strictly of indebtedness to one side or another. One of the most persuasive earlier theorists to think of this term, of what he termed Third Space (capitalized) is Bhabha: “It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.”30 The dynamic of refabrication and redeployment ought not to be understated, although it can frequently make for cultural configurations that resist easy, glib definition.
For the third term or third space is a cipher of plurality, and a protean state. They stand for what are a diversity of cultural realities that can in turn stand for many more terms, but all with the common denominator that they stand outside the tyranny of the two. As such it draws sustenance from what the artist and theorist Trinh Minh-Ha has called the “inappropriate/d other” to designate the “elsewhere,” the “liminal subjecthood” that exists across boundaries and across disciplines.31 Trinh is also engaging with the effects of “refugeeism” which has become an attribute, if not stain, of the global present, and an issue that calls for philosophical reflection almost as urgently as logistical and practical solutions.
This is the least glamorous or romantic aspect of the exotic. For historically in its mingling of fact and fabrication, the lure of the exotic involves a dangerous unknown that is sublimated in some way—the transformation of realities into metaphors—which has rightfully been a point of contention of the criticism of orientalism. Now if transorientalism brings these mechanisms of transformation and alteration into sharper relief, it is also a bringing-to-attention of the dangers of generic orientalism in the global present. In his acerbic critique of the disingenuous liberalist ideologies within multiculturalism, Slavoj Zizek notes that the praise of cultural hybridity means vastly different things depending on the demographic. The passage needs to be reproduced in full:
It is easy to praise the hybridity of the postmodern migrant subject no longer attached to specific ethnic roots, floating freely between different cultural circles. Unfortunately, two totally different sociopolitical levels are condensed here: on the one hand the cosmopolitan upper- and upper-middle class academic, always with the proper visas enabling him to cross borders without any problem in order to carry out his (financial, academic …) business, and thus able to “enjoy the difference”: on the other hand the poor (im)migrant worker driven from his home by poverty or (ethnic, religious) violence, for whom the celebrated “hybridity” designates a very tangible traumatic experience of never being able to settle down properly and legalize his status, the subject for whom such simple tasks as crossing a border or reuniting with his family can be an experience full of anxiety, and demanding great effort. For this second subject, being uprooted from the traditional way of life is a traumatic shock which destabilizes his entire existence—to tell him he should enjoy hybridity and the lack of fixed identity of his daily life, the fact that his existence as a migrant, never identical-to-itself, and so on, involves the same cynicism as that art work in the (popularized version) of Deleuze and Guattari’s celebration of the schizo-subject whose traumatic pulverized existence explodes the paranoiac “proto-Fascist” protective shield of fixed identity.32
At various intervals, this book will circle back to this theme, so as not to forget that the liberation of hybridity, the lure of the exotic, the interest in the other, the possibilities available in self-othering, and the rewards of cultural displacement are haunted by an underside that is easily, conveniently overlooked.
For those who have the opportunity to escape straightened and traumatic events, there is the possibility of reclaiming identity. The majority of us are born with a name, a nationality and sundry of circumstances over which we have no control, however it is a common subjective instinct to investigate these conditions. Subjective identity is largely defined by the nature of this question. An increasing effect of postcolonialism has been the reinsertion of identity, particularly as applies to indigeneity—here more commonly applied to people adversely affected by colonization. Similarly, “indigenous” may be more commonly applied to a Tibetan than to someone from Beijing. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has theorized this inclination of focus, this tipping, in her studies of the subaltern. She also explores such tensions according to the “double bind” in which formerly colonialized subjects find themselves in a variety of cultural spheres. “Let us think of culture as a package of largely unacknowledged assumptions, loosely held by a loosely outlined group of people, mapping negotiations between the sacred and the profane, and the relationship between the sexes.”33 Culture, then, is always an approximation but more for some than for others according to what is bartered, stolen, and (re-)created.
The meaning, structure, and communication of indigenous identity has also changed in recent decades, and to the extent that there are numerous subject positions that need to be taken into account. While claiming, owning, and representing indigenous identity has always been a fraught topic, it is especially hard to navigate in the instances where indigenous peoples identify with their heritage years after their birth. Whereas Islamic artists depart their country of origin in order then to explore, dissect, and enrich what it means to be from their place of origin, many indigenous artists embark on paths of reclamation and return. This return is to the physical places, but it is also imagined, spiritual, and symbolic. The role of language is central to this process, as identification comes from naming, as names designate and situate the subject: the name is the “what” bound to the “who.” Many countries are behind in understanding this, however New Zealand is a distinguished example of mixed language—English and Maori—signs in its public places.
It is a linguistic juxtaposition that points to an ontic one. For in the age of the reclamation of culture—which can be said to begin in the protest era of the late 1960s—there is now a discernibly more widespread phenomenon. Distinguishing oneself as an ethnic minority is often carried with the language emphasizing minority status, so that “Afro-American” or “Indigenous Australian” is redolent of the implication that “American” and “Australian” are imposed, if not foreign, terms describing a juridical but not spiritual affiliation. But since at least the new millennium, the adoption and invention of multiple online personas means that more people occupy multiple spaces, where they can be of one identity (race, gender, whatever else) on one platform, and another somewhere else. The ease with which this can be done has percolated to everyday life, in which an individual may pose and act in different capacities according to the needs and expectations of a particular context. A parallel example in identity shifting is that of cosplay, a practice originating between Japan and America that has emerged over the very same period.
The understanding that the spaces of culture are mutually exclusive, blended, melded, and plural has been vitiated by 9/11, the refugee crises, and the ongoing threat of ISIS, which, among others, have polarized and ruined many lives and communities. In the presence of real and imagined danger, and mired in riddles of “known unknowns” and the like, the “East” has resurfaced as something of a solid concept, namely synonymous with jihad and militant Islam. Where, earlier in the Orient, fear reigned it was accompanied by desire and uncertainty. The East is simply a place where the ills foment. Yet these immoderate conditions have not deleted the East in the artistic and aesthetic imaginations. If anything, they have contributed to a new rise in interest, where the Orient is manufactured, situated, and represented throughout the entire world.
The examples explored in this book will help to clarify the many levels at which cultural otherness is manufactured, sutured, instated, or reinstated. But to conclude it is worth turning to a passage in Hegel’s analysis of the glories of classical Greek art, which he and his contemporaries upheld as exemplifying the glories of Western civilization. The passage helps to elucidate how the Orient is inscribed into the essence of their culture. The Greeks, he states, drew substantially from the art, religion, social interaction, and lore
from Asia, Syria and Egypt: but they have so greatly obliterated the foreign nature of this origin, and it is so much changed, worked upon, turned around, and altogether made so different, that what they, as we, prize, known and love in it, is essentially their own.… The foreign origin they have so to speak thanklessly forgotten, putting it in the background—perhaps burying it in the darkness and the mysteries which they have kept secret from themselves.34
To this, Zizek adds, “The notion of the Greek miracle as the outcome of organic, spontaneous self-generation is thus an illusion grounded in brutal repression,” which is its essential impurity and its flaw.35 Flaw or not, the inscription of one within another is what is fundamentally at stake.
Transorientalism is not the erosion of culture but the recognition of its repeated re-assertion, a dynamic evident in art, fashion, and film. The other term, from which this book draws heavily, is of course literature. But if the principles of transorientalism as I define them are not already amply demonstrated in literature, they have in different ways already been subjects of deeper study. A significant example, whose writings this book will draw from, is V.S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian who made his way in England and who spent the larger part of his career describing the predicaments of the era after colonialism, that, problematic to some, were not always sympathetic to the erstwhile colonized. In Naipaul’s work, as in that of his younger brother Shiva, we are made witness to the contradictions of the postcolonial who attempts to surmount his inferiority while in equal measure placing impediments in his own path. These challenges expose the national imaginary: the way that nationhood is more a product of imagination and belief, just as the “West” is an amorphous word for prosperity and escape, more than something factual. The space of transorientalism is that of the way East and West are blended, while also keeping a distinctive quality of difference from one or another. It is also a space of multiple dimensions, of straddling cultures.
The emphasis on art, fashion, and film, while already sufficiently broad, can be justified by what Rey Chow has called “visualism.” Inspired after Foucault’s archaeological approach of using visual data in his research, Chow asserts that cultural otherness has an overwhelming basis in visual characteristics, suggesting that ethnicity is more an arbitrary term that is built on classifications based on images.36 While Chow’s critique extends primarily to feminist discourse and the way women are treated as visual images, it is applied here also to forms and objects of representation, just as she turns to cinema. Visualism emphasizes the way in which meanings are visually accounted for and constructed. Another of Chow’s sources for the use of this term is Gilles Deleuze’s study of Foucault, who interprets “visibility as the structuration of knowability.”37 Visibility as such is not to be taken as the obviously seen, but applies to the status of the way knowledge comes into being, and involves “consideration of the less immediately and sensorially detectable elements helping to propel, enhance, or obstruct such visibility in the first place,” as well as “the often vacillating relations between the visible and the invisible.”38 Chow’s immediate terms of reference from which these lines were taken are film—to be discussed in more detail—but they can also naturally apply to fashion and art. A related precedent to Chow’s visualism—perhaps to her misgiving—can be found in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, wherein the “aesthetic” is the name for the sensory configuration that enshrines a deeper, less accountable logic of being able to combine ideas, narratives, instances, which could otherwise not be if subjected to logic or ideology. The aesthetic is for Adorno a particular epistemic modality, not only the object of reflective judgment or taste.
The chapters in this book have been arranged as discrete “departments.” Their principal emphasis lies in the ways in which key cultures associated with orientalism—Turkey, China, India, Japan—have undertaken their own creation and refashioning with examples in art, fashion, and film. One approach may take precedence over others if it better illustrates the transorientalist condition. The first chapter, however, centers on how culture is a very particular and dense matrix of imagining, as famously developed by Benedict Anderson. It will also delve into the reflexive analyses of culture, especially that of Spivak. The following two chapters are devoted to Turkey, first from the way in which its Westernization was brokered along the lines of dress and appearance. The other chapter examines the global contemporary Turkish artist, with reference to four artists who grapple with Turkey’s layered past and its complex status as a nexus between East and West. In a similar way, Chapter 4 looks closely on women Muslim artists whose practice as such is enabled only by living abroad. This is followed by a chapter on contemporary Chinoiserie, “China style,” focusing on the 2015 exhibition, China: Through the Looking Glass, and on examples of the cross-cultural and intertextual nature of Chinese cinema. Chapter 6 investigates Japan’s numerous modern renaissances, starting with the Meiji Restoration, and culminating in the re-figuring, re-packaging, and re-selling of itself after the shame of the Second World War through popular culture, particularly manga and anime. The elusive, Svengali status of “Japan but not Japan but Japan” also finds its embodiment in a designer such as Rei Kawakubo, and the manner in which Japanese fashion has become a vessel for cultural affirmation through repositioning. India was also compelled to rethink itself. When it took on independence in 1947, it was drawn to an ancient, mythic past, while at the same time trying to decide which of the many imposed laws and mores of the British Raj were desirable, meaningful, or expedient. India is still beset with a crippling caste system that for many is a lesser evil that integrates a varied and over-populated nation. Drawn from the higher and merchant classes, the exponents of contemporary Indian fashion provide yet more evidence of cultural appropriation from outside and within. The final chapter adumbrates the highly contested space of trans-nationality as debated in Indigenous studies in the last few decades. Trans-indigeneity is not only an emotive notion, it is far from universally embraced, seen by some as a sham and a betrayal, by others as an affirmation of the multiple identities that have flowered as a result of globalization. Because of the experience of the author, this discussion will revolve around Australian Indigenous cultures for whom art is a vehicle for negotiating, affirming, or resisting this “trans” status.
When applied to individuals and groups, the word “belonging” sags under the weight of its many disingenuous xenophobic applications. It is both nostalgic, and yet refers to an instinct that is basic for people of any kind to prosper. The safety of belonging to a place, a group, a culture, or a creed underpins any individual’s course of action and view of the world. Yet belonging now has a special resonance in this day where millions are cast out of where they belong through political upheaval or natural calamity. A countless number of the world’s population are forced to live their life out in “trans” zones, from camps to detention centers. For this countless many the space of transition is made permanent, the only certainty being a constant state of uncertainty.
I have been at pains at certain junctures in this book to alight upon depredations such as these, as well as grisly social injustices such as being born innocently into a caste that consigns you to the most abject service. Although not exhaustive, they deserve attention in order to remove the romantic strains proper to traditional orientalism, and to do some moral justice to a word much used in this book: “diversity.” For diversity is not necessarily benign, it can pertain to caste and class, and to opinions and laws that thwart a voiceless multitude.
With this in mind, we can nonetheless turn to the positive meanings of “trans” in transorientalism. As has repeatedly shown, just as postmodern critics have argued that postmodernity already lay within modernity, analogously transorientalism is already pregnant within orientalism. Given that orientalism is by nature an amorphous concept, guided by desire more than geography, this can be taken to be stating that transorientalism and orientalism are one and the same. Rather, transorientalism highlights the speciousness of the Orient–Occident divide when viewed against fashion, film, and art of recent decades, which show the methods by which foreignness is renounced, or the opposite: reinvigorated, rehearsed, and resuscitated. A world divided into two has the advantage of simplification, but simplification leads to obfuscation. Transorientalism is not the denial of belonging, nor does it cheapen the legitimacy of those who argue entitlement to one or another group, nation, or identity. Rather transorientalism is a term for the queering of cultural identity, for it emphasizes its modulations and movements. Nations, cultures, and subjectivities are never static. How and with whom we belong and identify can change over time by choice or by circumstance. The notion of transorientalism brings to light how we are complicit in such change through the power of imaginative construction, therefore viewing culture and identity as a balance between what has been imposed and what can be created.