Through the Looking Glass:
Orientalism, Reverse Orientalism and Beyond in Literature and Film
CFP for edited collection (2020)
Statement of Aims
The influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism over the last four decades, both in its specific theoretical applications to Asia and the Middle East, and in its more nebulous uses across a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, has been well documented and closely debated. For the purposes of this discussion it should be noted that the term “Asia” is conceived broadly to not only encompass South, East and Southeast Asia but to also include countries from the region of Western Asia, amongst which are those geographical, political or cultural formations collectively referred to as the “Middle East”. Said’s central proposition—reinforced in subsequent commentaries such as The World, the Text and the Critic (1983) and Culture and Imperialism (1993)—that Occidental spheres of influence and imperialist policies produced not only physical colonisation but a construction of an imaginary “East” (including a “Far East” and “Middle East”) which robbed Asia and Arab regions of their agency in terms of self-representation is, though refuted by some, generally acknowledged across a number of academic disciplines. Whether one accepts this creed or is opposed to it there is little argument that, for better or worse, it invariably frames and at times overwhelms theoretical analysis of East-West interaction. Subsequent analysis of Western fictional texts located in Asia or representing aspects of Asia, and Asian texts either responding to Western canonical works and Western representations of Asia, or representing Western culture(s), has invariably been dominated by this binary of East-West power dynamics. Yet, while noting that these perspectives have (arguably) served as a useful ideological starting point in many such discussions, more recent processes of globalisation, transnationalism, and multimedia may render such binary polarities as superfluous.
