Colonial fantasies

Author(s) Yegenoglu, Meyda

Imprint Cambridge University Press, 1998

ISBN 9780521482332, 9780521626583,

9780511583445

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 Mapping the field of colonial
discourse

The Orient: a suppressed authenticity or an idea without a

referent?
Edward Said's Orientalism1 offers a powerful analysis of the structure of
those varied Western discourses which represent the Orient and Islam as an
object for investigation and control. By covering a historical corpus of liter-
ary, scientific, and diplomatic discourses, Said brings to our attention a
textual universe which draws an imaginative geographical distinction
between the peoples and cultures of the West and East. We learn from Said
that a vast array of rhetorical figures and discursive tropes were employed
by the West to represent and know the Orient.
However, Said's work is not merely about how Europe represented the
Orient, it also raises some significant general theoretical and political ques-
tions. By offering a rich panorama of the ways in which Orientalist texts
constitute the Orient as a racial, cultural, political, and geographical unity,
Orientalism also provides a fruitful arena where questions of a more
general nature, questions that pertain to the representation of cultural and
sexual difference and the nature of the discursive constitution of otherness,
could be raised. Said's analysis demonstrates that what is at stake in the
constitution of the Oriental other is the West's desire to set boundaries for
itself as a self-sustaining, autonomous, and sovereign subject. He illustrates
the dialectics of self and other that is at play in Orientalist discourse by con-
tinually alluding to the establishment of a binary opposition between the
Orient and Occident as the primordial technique operating at its very core.
Said's analysis also focuses on how the Western desire to represent the
Oriental other is interlocked with its will to power. Situating the emergence
of Orientalism within the peak period of colonialism, Said extends Michel
Foucault's concept of power/knowledge nexus to the representation of the
Orient and demonstrates the close ties between Western knowledge and

14

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 Mapping the field 15

its will to power. The relationship between colonial expansion and

Orientalism that Said's analysis demonstrates has been picked up by his
critics. For example, Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg argue that Said's
definition of Orientalism alludes to the "complicity between Orientalism
and imperialism" and how "Orientalism has informed and shaped the colo-
nial enterprise."2 Likewise, Robert Young, by referring to Orientalism's
close ties with enabling socioeconomic and political institutions of coloni-
alism, argues that Said's analysis demonstrates how Orientalism "justified
colonialism in advance as well as subsequently facilitating its successful
operation" (emphasis added).3 James Clifford is another critic who points
to this important connection and argues that Said correctly identifies how
the essentializing and dichotomizing discourse of Orientalism "functions
in a complex but systematic way as an element of colonial domination." 4
However, a closer look at Said's work reveals that in referring to the power
of Orientalism, he does not in any simple and limited way refer to the eco-
nomic, political, and administrative institutions of colonial domination,
although such institutions constitute a significant part of it. By pointing to
the configurations of power, Said also emphasizes that Orientalism is an
apparatus of knowledge with its will-to-truth. However, this connection is
not given sufficent consideration in the analysis of the above commenta-
tors. This enhanced emphasis upon the articulation of Orientalism with
forces of colonial domination implies a confinement of the efficacy of
Orientalist discourse to an ideological supplement and thus to an effacement
of the power implied in the production and dissemination of academic and
other forms of knowledge. Seen from the perspective of power/knowledge
nexus, Said's analysis could very well be extended to historical periods that
exceed territorial colonialism. To emphasize this connection we need to pay
close attention to the nature of the relation Said establishes between repre-
sentation, knowledge, and power.
As a distinct style of representation, Orientalist discourse offers an inter-
pretive strategy or a body of knowledge about the cultures and peoples of
"Oriental" localities. By emphasizing the discursive mechanism of
Orientalism, Said aims to go beyond Marxism's base-superstructure model
in which the role of ideology is understood to be the legitimation of the
material, or economic conditions.5 His insistence on Orientalism as a dis-
cursive regime constitutes a valuable intervention against an understanding
of Orientalism as an ideological instrument that is "fabricated" in the
service of colonial power. As I noted above, by using Foucault's notion of
discourse, Said unravels how Orientalism is intimately connected with
apparently objective academic scholarship. This emphasis on the complic-
ity between academic knowledge and the forms of subjugation and

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16 Colonial fantasies

administration of other cultures shifts the analysis towards an examinina-

tion of the discursive mechanism of Orientalism which prescribes what can
be said and recognized as the "truth" of the Orient. Thus, for Said, the
process of the production of the knowledge of the Orient and the process
of its subjugation by colonial power do not stand in an external relation to
each other. The incorporation of Foucault's insight in the analysis of
Western ethnocentricism needs to be understood as an effort to understand
the productive nature of the discourse of Orientalism. However, although
Said occasionally alludes to the constitutive role of Orientalist discourse,
we still need to question to what extent he successfully elaborates this
important point.
Let us first delineate briefly Foucault's notion of power. He objects to a
notion of power understood in a narrow sense; a notion according to which
the effects of power are assumed to be negative or repressive. Contrary to
the understanding of power that is presumed to be independent of knowl-
edge or truth statements, Foucault wants to capture its productive nature -
power induces forms of knowledge and forms of discourse. Seen in this
way, power produces effects of truth, which are in themselves neither true
nor false. Following Foucault's argument, Said suggests that the effect of
Orientalist discourse is "to formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity,
definition with full recognition of its place in memory, its importance to
imperial strategy, and its 'natural' role as an appendage to Europe."6 The
conclusion we can derive from the above statement is that the "truth,"
"identity," or "reality" of the Orient is not something that stands in an
external relationship to the discourse of Orientalism and something against
which we can measure the "truthfulness" of representations. Indeed, to use
the formulation Judith Butler7 develops in a different context, both the cat-
egory of the Orient as well as the declaration of its exteriority to discourse
is constituted by the very discourse of Orientalism as the founding princi-
ple of its claim to legitimacy. Said suggests that the discursive strategy
deployed by Orientalism is homologous to realism. The utilization of this
realist mode of representation creates the Orient. As he puts it:

Philosophically, then, the kind of language, thought, and vision that I have been
calling Orientalism very generally is a form of radical realism; anyone employing
Orientalism which is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities and
regions deemed Oriental, will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or
thinking about with a word or phrase, which is then considered either to have
acquired, or more simply to be, reality.8
They [figures of speech associated with the Orient] are all declarative and self
evident; the tense they employ is the timeless eternal... For all these functions it is
frequently enough to use the simple copula is.9

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 Mapping the field 17

Therefore, the Orientalness of the Orient, for Said, is not something that
is given as a fact of "nature." Rather, the essentializing discourse of
Orientalism, which is achieved by the copula is not only construes the
Orient as the place of sensuality, corrupt despotism, mystical religiosity,
sexually unstable Arabs, irrationality, backwardness, and so on, but also
makes the Orientalists' inquiry into the nature of "Islamic mind" and "Arab
character" perfectly legitimate. It is precisely through such essentializing
claims that the Orient is Orientalized. The repertoire of these images,
figures, tropes are the very means by which the Orient is made Oriental. As
Said puts it, "the Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discov-
ered to be 'Oriental' in all those ways considered commonplace by an
average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be . . . made
Oriental";10 knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in
a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world.11
By following the above line of reasoning, we can suggest that geography
must not be understood simply as a knowledge about a "natural" referent,
but is inextricably linked with cultural signification. The very knowledge
produced in and by the Orientalist discourse "creates" the Orient:12 Such
discourses "create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear
to describe."13 The Orient as such becomes possible only through the
knowledge produced in and by these texts.
However, I should caution the reader not to be misled by my selective
juxtaposition of Said's remarks regarding the constitutive character of dis-
course. Although it is not totally incorrect to argue that Said tends to rec-
ognize that discourse constitutes the object it speaks about, it is not possible
to argue with full confidence that he is completely divorced from a concep-
tion of language as a mediation. This prevents him from radically calling
into question the economy that underwrites the binary opposition between
the "real" and representation.14 The interrogation of such a dichotomy
would first of all, among other things, require questioning the notion of an
extra-textual referent which we do not attest in Said's work. Rather, the
theoretical status of representation in his work can at best be characterized
as fraught with dilemmas and ambivalences. James Clifford draws our
attention to such a methodological ambivalence in Said's text. According
to Clifford, Said's position vacillates between accepting something called
"the real Orient" and regarding "the Orient" as the construct of a question-
able mental operation.15 It is to these contradictory methodological posi-
tions that I want to turn now.
It is his apparent refutation of any appeal to a notion of a "real,"
"authentic," or "true" Orient that sets Said's work apart from many main-
stream analyses of the representation of "other" cultures. Rejecting an

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18 Colonial fantasies

understanding of Orientalism as a misrepresentation of the truth of the

Orient, Said argues that the methodological problems of Orientalism
cannot be delineated by simply claiming that the "real" Orient does not cor-
respond to the image depicted in Orientalist texts. He explicitly refutes the
thesis that "there is such a thing as a real or true Orient (Islam, Arab or
whatever)."16 Instead, his analysis exposes the category of the Orient as an
effect of a specific formation of power. He does not seem to look for a
genuine or authentic Oriental identity/reality, but aspires to examine the
processes by which institutions, practices, and discourses posit and desig-
nate an essential or original Oriental identity and the political stakes
involved in such processes. Hence Said disputes the notion of an Oriental
culture which can be defined on the basis of some essential quality.
Contrary to such widespread assumptions, Said suggests that "the Orient
itself is a constituted entity."17 Having argued that the Orient "was recon-
structed, reassembled, crafted, in short born out of the Orientalists'
effort,"18 Said then proposes "to look at styles, figures of speech, setting,
narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of
the representation nor its fidelity to some great original."19
However, Said's attempt to understand the constitutive power of
Orientalist discourse is not very convincing at times, for his analysis poses
a set of theoretical problems that he does not fully engage with. As I men-
tioned above, on the one hand he argues that Orientalism "creates" the
Orient and on the other hand he cautions us not to conclude that the Orient
is just an idea, with no corresponding reality.20 This, for James Clifford,
should be regarded as a manifestation of an important contradiction in
Said. One of the reasons why such a contradiction exists in Said should be
sought in the notion of language that Said uses. One such example can be
seen in his ready acceptance of the rather simplistic account of the notion
of representation offered by Barthes. This can be taken as one indication of
the restricted notion of language Said deploys for understanding
Orientalism: "representations are formations, or as Roland Barthes has
said of all the operations of language, they are deformations."21 The notion
of language Said uses seems to be limited to linguistic activity. For example
he argues in a rather unquestioning manner that "the Orient was a word
which later accrued to it a wide field of meanings, associations, and
connotations, and that these did not necessarily refer to the real Orient but
to the field surrounding the word" 22 (emphasis added).
If Said readily accepts such a notion of language, then he must be
moving further away from a notion of discourse as a process which consti-
tutes the very object it represents, for it implies that language is merely a
collection of words and associations, and is a device in the service of image

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 Mapping the field 19

making. Such a notion of discourse is clearly limited to a linguistic activity

and establishes a dichotomy between the real/material (which is assumed to
be extra-discursive) and the discursive. Having argued that the Orient is
created, constituted, and born out of these representations, the above dis-
tinction between the discursive and extra-discursive, between words, ideas,
and the "real," constitutes a major contradiction which Said leaves unre-
solved.
Following the concept of discourse employed by Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe, we can suggest that Said operates with an assumption of
the mental character of discourse. According to Laclau and Mouffe, to
suggest that the object of discourse is constituted does not imply a rejec-
tion of the materialist idea that there is a world external to thought. Nor
does this thesis have anything to do with the opposition between realism
and idealism - a trap which Said seems to fall into. What Laclau and
Mouffe contest is not that there are objects existing in the world, but the
assumption that "they could constitute themselves as objects outside any
discursive condition of emergence."23 Hence, with a restricted notion of
language, Said's analysis is bound to consider Orientalist discourse as a
collection of images and ideas about the Orient, having no real efficacy in
the construction of its materiality or the Orientalness of the Orient. Such
an understanding runs counter to his continual emphasis on the "creation"
and "constitution" or the Orientalization of the Orient in and by the dis-
course of Orientalism.
Robert Young follows a different path in his critique of the same point.
For Young, Said attempts to make two points at once: on the one hand, he
denies any correspondence between the "real" and representation of the
Orient; on the other hand, he argues that the knowledge produced in and
by Orientalism was put in the service of colonial conquest. These two argu-
ments, according to Young, contradict each other, for, if Said wants to
claim that Orientalism as a body of knowledge became effective at a
material level as a form of colonial power and control, this means that the
representations had to encounter the "actual" Orient. According to Young,
however, Said denies that there is any actual Orient which could provide a
true account against Orientalist representations. And he asks: "how can
then Said argue that the "Orient" is just a representation, if he also wants
to claim that "Orientalism" provided the necessary knowledge for the
actual colonial conquest."24
Young's critique does not seem to be well taken, for in attempting to over-
come the dualistic account which characterizes Said's analysis, he himself
develops another dualism, that of between reality and representation. The
notion of the "actual" which Young too readily accepts does not seem to

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20 Colonial fantasies

be sufficiently developed to enable us to engage with the "representation"

versus "real" problem that Said's text poses. It is rather naive to approach
Said's work as if he is claiming that there is no "actual" geographical place
called the Orient, or there are no "actual" Oriental people living on these
geographical spaces, or the "actual" colonial conquest did not happen. It
is, after all, Said who in the first place establishes the indissociable link
between the colonial conquest and Orientalist knowledge. In a way, crit-
icisms such as Young's reiterate what Said's text has already demonstrated.
The epistemological problem that needs to be mapped out in Said's text is
certainly more complex than Young suggests and cannot easily be resolved
by claiming that there is an "actual" Orient and that this can be proved by
pointing to the "fact" of colonial conquest. In other words, Young far too
easily assumes that if Said does not really elaborate the theoretical status
of the complex relationship between representation and reality, then he
must be naively refusing the referentiality of the Orient. While there is no
doubt that the theoretical status of the notion of representation or dis-
course in Said's text is cryptic, the pressing theoretical question cannot
easily be reduced to the question of the "actualness" of the Orient. If we
want our analysis to exceed the common understanding of discourse as a
kind of linguisticism, then we should entertain the possibility that the
materiality of the Orient is indistinguishable from the essentializing dis-
course of Orientalism. The efficacy of the discourse of Orientalism should
thus be sought in its power to produce the phenomena it names and speaks
about. Moreover, we also need to acknowledge that the notion of the
"actual Orient" as preceding language is itself posed retrospectively by the
very discourse that Orientalizes the Orient. A deconstructive reading of
Orientalism would reckon that the Orient is always-already articulated in a
discursive field and that this articulation entails the materialization or
incorporation of the Orient within such representations. The evocation of
the Orient's always-already constituted character within discursivity need
not imply suspending reference altogether, but should be seen as an invita-
tion to think about the complex nature of the referentiality itself25
The status of the referent and its involuted relationship with discourse or
textuality has been preoccupying critics working in various different fields
who aim to reformulate the referent's material and at the same time dis-
cursively constituted character. The question of discursive constitution of
the object has also been on the agenda of feminist criticism. One such
exemplary attempt comes from Judith Butler.26 In interrogating the worthi-
ness of the ostensible duality between discursive and non-discursive, Judith
Butler's aim, in Bodies that Matter, is to rethink the complex nature of the
referent called the body.27 Her refutation of the notion of a pure body is an

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 Mapping the field 21

attempt to alter the meaning of referentiality and theorize its materiality by

questioning the common assumption that accords it an extra-textual status.
As she suggests, "to refer naively or directly to such an extra-discursive
object will always require the prior delimitation of the extra-discursive.
And in so far as the extra-discursive is delimited, it is formed by the very
discourse from which it seeks to free itself."28 Thinking that materiality is
the most productive effect of power, Butler locates this materialization as a
"kind of citationality, as the acquisition of being through the citing of
power."29 Thus the materiality of the referent needs to be seen as the materi-
alization and citational accumulation of this regulatory norm. Critical of
the constructivism versus essentialism opposition, Butler reminds us that
the point is not simply to suggest that "everything is discursively con-
structed" but to understand construction as a process of materialization
which is stabilized over time through a forcible reiteration of a founding
interpellation that reinforces a naturalized effect.30
Of course, such attempts do not remain unchallenged. Critics who
reduce discursive constitution to determinism claim that agency has been
foreclosed in such constructivist arguments. Engaging with such an inter-
locutor, Butler counters the notion of a voluntarist subject whose resis-
tance is assumed to require its existence detached from the regulatory
norms. For her, the question of agency needs to be located in the appropria-
tion or rearticulation of the regulatory norm, for the citing of the law
implies that it can be produced differently. For Butler, the necessity of
reiteration demonstrates that this materialization is never fully completed
or the body never completely complies with norms. The need for re-mate-
rialization indicates a potential for turning the regulatory norm against
itself. Reiteration must not, therefore, be understood as a final fixing or
reduced to determinism, for it is through this reiteration that "gaps and fis-
sures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions."31
Such instabilities, for Butler, demonstrate a deconstructive possibility as the
object constituted escapes or exceeds the norms. Moreover, as Foucault's
notion of subjectivation {assujetisemeni) suggests, discourses which consti-
tute the subject are at the same time the condition of possibility of its
empowerment. Therefore, the critical question does not lie merely in posit-
ing the agency of the subject, but in acknowledging the double bind logic
of the process of subjectification, a bind that subjects as well as enables.
If we turn to the question of the constitutive force of Orientalism,
conceptualizing the Orient's reality as a material effect of the process of sig-
nification requires redefining the Orientalist discourse as a process of
materialization. The Orient "as such" needs to be comprehended as a dis-
cursive effect, as a textual referent which is always-already entangled with

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22 Colonial fantasies

its representation, always articulated within a political field of signification.

The point here is not to give up on the idea of the referentiality of the
Orient, but to reconceptualize this referentiality as an embodiment of a
certain discursive production, to understand the process of signification as
an Orientalization of the Orient. Such an understanding will undercut
appeals to an extra-textual referent and foster an understanding of why an
outside of the text of Orientalism is unthinkable, for the Orient, in this
reconceptualization, will be seen as already a manifestation of a particular
discursive articulation.
The emphasis on the material constitution of the Orient by the discourse
of Orientalism also implies not divorcing language from the constitution of
subjectivity. To redefine the problematic of representation so as to see the
Orientalist discourse not as a mediation between an extra-discursive signi-
fied and a process of signification, but as a practice that constitutes not only
the object but also the subjects who are investigated also undermines the
validity of the criticisms about the repudiation of agency. The foreclosure
of agency and counter-histories is one of the widespread criticisms
advanced against Said's analysis. It is suggested that by portraying
Orientalism in totalizing terms, Orientalism leaves no room for appreciat-
ing the agency of the Other. When Orientalism as a cultural representation
is not seen simply as a constraining or distorting process, but as a practice
of active constitution of subjectivity, enabling and empowering as well as
dominating, then resistance to colonial power or the restoration of the col-
onized as the subject of history cannot be theorized apart from the
Orientalist discourse. The discursive constitution of the subject does not
connote merely a total pacification or a process of producing the being of
the Oriental subjects as a stable category fixed in a position of subjugation,
but an enabling process as well. When this paradox of subjectification is
recognized, suggestions about theorizing agency as outside Orientalist dis-
course become simply untenable. I will discuss this point further in chapter
2. But now let me turn to the discussion of binarism that seems to be one
of the major weaknesses in Said's analysis.

Binarisms of Orientalism
In characterizing the discursive economy of Orientalism through a set of
binary terms, Said posits a polarity or duality at its very center. The fol-
lowing definition of Orientalism is an instance of such a polarity:
Orientalism is the generic term that I have been employing 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, discovery and practice. But in

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 Mapping the field 23

addition I have been using the word to designate the collection of dreams, images
and vocabularies available to anyone who has tried to talk about what lies East of
the dividing line. These two aspects of Orientalism are not incongruent, since by use
of them both Europe could advance securely and unmetaphorically upon the
Orient.32 [emphasis added]
The two senses of Orientalism used above are further elaborated in the
following pages. Here Said makes a distinction between latent and manifest
Orientalism - a distinction which has profound implications for reformu-
lating the structure of Orientalist discourse. Manifest Orientalism is "the
various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history,
sociology and so forth," whereas latent Orientalism refers to "an almost
unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity."33 Thus latent
Orientalism reflects the site of the unconscious, where dreams, images,
desires, fantasies and fears reside. Orientalism, then, simultaneously refers
to the production of a systematic knowledge and to the site of the uncon-
scious - desires and fantasies; it signifies how the "Orient" is at once an
object of knowledge and an object of desire.
Latent Orientalism seems to have a fundamental significance in Said's
overall analysis, for he argues that it is through this latent structure that
Orientalism achieves its doctrinal and doxological character, its everyday-
ness and natural-ness, its taken-for-granted authority. It thereby provides
travellers, writers, historians, and anthropologists with an "enunciative
capacity"34 which could be mobilized for handling any concrete, unique
issue at hand. In other words, latent Orientalism is "transmitted from one
generation to another" partly because of an "internal consistency about its
constitutive will-to-power over the Orient."35 Thus, this permanent, con-
sistent, systematic, and articulated knowledge of Orientalism establishes a
discursive field, or as Said describes it, a "textual attitude" through which
any concrete Oriental detail could be made sense of.
However, in implying a kind of sub-structural, disseminating, and
authorizing knowledge, the distinction between the latent and manifest
Orientalism seems to have wider implications than Said himself recognizes.
It is analogous to the distinction made in psychoanalysis between the latent
and manifest content of the dream.36 Although Said refers, in passing, to
the concept of latent Orientalism as the realm where unconscious desires,
fantasies, and dreams about the Orient reside, he never elaborates its nature
nor the processes and mechanisms involved in its working. He does not
engage in a discussion of its role in the constitution of the relationship
between the Western subject and its Oriental other by subjecting this
unconscious site to a more detailed psychoanalytic reading. However, I do
not in any way want to imply that psychoanalysis is the theory that can

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24 Colonial fantasies

lead us in the most correct way for understanding the workings of

Orientalist discourse. Although psychoanalytic theory has been used in
quite an inspiring way for developing a theory of colonial discourse, espe-
cially the account offered by Bhabha, his framework is not completely
unproblematical either. The reason I dwell on Said's reluctance to further
elaborate the above point in psychoanalytic terms is mainly because the dis-
tinction he introduces between the manifest and latent content is one that
has its origins in psychoanalysis. In chapter 2, where I demonstrate the
intermingling of representations of cultural and sexual difference by
reading the unconscious structure of Orientalism, psychoanalytic theory
proves to be useful. However, this should not imply that I regard psycho-
analysis as the theory which can offer the most accurate account of
Orientalism. Nor does it imply that I believe psychoanalysis can be
unproblematically applied to the analysis of Orientalism. I use psycho-
analysis not because I believe it offers the truth, and that truth can once
more be demonstrated by applying it to the discourse of Orientalism. It is
rather the other way around: my point of departure is the Orientalist dis-
course itself, which I believe exhibits important material that can be use-
fully examined in terms of ideology and subject constitution, and
psychoanalysis provides convincing theoretical tools for comprehending
their functioning in Orientalism.37
As I suggested above, Said's text is also imbued with the binary economy
he criticizes. The various definitions of Orientalism he offers are trapped
within this economy. As Young also mentions, even though "Orientalism is
directed against the hierarchical dualism of the "West" and "East," other
dualisms ceaselessly proliferate throughout his text."38 Hence, the field of
Orientalism is characterized in discrete terms: it is a topic of learning and
a site of dreams; it has both a manifest (stated knowledges about the Orient)
and latent content (an unconscious positivity); it is also characterized by
synchronic essentialism (making the Orient synonymous with stability and
unchanging eternality) and diachronic forms of history (recognition of the
possibility of instability which suggests change, growth, decline and move-
ment in the Orient). Rather than treating this aspect of Said's text as an
indication of weakness, Homi Bhabha takes it as a starting point from
which to develop a more refined analysis of colonial discourse in order to
understand the articulation of cultural difference. According to Bhabha, by
resolving the oppositions he set earlier, Said loses the inventive character of
his diagnoses, because in unifying the two, at times contradictory, systems
that characterize Orientalism, Said moves further away from engaging with
the problem of ambivalence and the contradictory economy that structures
and sustains it. For Bhabha, what lies behind Said's definition of a mono-

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 Mapping the field 25

lithic and closed system is the assumption of a unitary intention on the side
of the Orientalist who is conceived of as "motivated" by a desire and will
to govern the Orient. 39

The question of sexuality

Said is certainly not unaware of the nature and extent of the sexual implica-
tions of the unconscious site of Orientalism to which I have referred above.
He mentions, for instance, "how latent Orientalism also encouraged a pecu-
liarly . . . male conception of the world" and how Orientalism "viewed itself
and its subject matter with sexist blinders."40 When he talks about Nerval's
work, he points to the sexual dimensions of his representation of the
Orient.41
On another occasion, when he discusses the ways in which the Oriental
woman is represented in Flaubert's works, he alludes to the uniform
association established between the Orient and sex. However, in the fol-
lowing few lines Said confesses the limits of his analysis:
Woven through all of Flaubert's Oriental experiences, exciting or disappointing, is
an almost uniform association between the Orient and sex. In making this associa-
tion Flaubert was neither the first nor the most exaggerated instance of a remark-
ably persistent motif in Western attitudes to the Orient . . . Why the Orient seems
still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality,
unlimited desire, deep generative energies, is something on which one could speculate;
it is not the province of my analysis here, alas, despite its frequently noted appearance.
Nevertheless one must acknowledge its importance as something eliciting complex
responses, sometimes even a frightening self-discovery, in the Orientalists, and
Flaubert was an interesting case in point.42 (emphasis added)
If the uniform association between the Orient and sex is such a consti-
tutive trope in Orientalist discourse, how can we regard these as issues
belonging to a separate province? What are the implications, for his overall
analysis, of Said's decision to leave the discussion of the the sexual/uncon-
scious site of Orientalism to a distinct field?
Said's reluctance to engage with Orientalism through psychoanalytic cat-
egories has an inhibiting effect on his pioneering analysis. For example, it
prevents him from fully demonstrating the inextricable link between the
process of understanding, of knowing the other cultures, and the uncon-
scious and sexual dimensions involved in this process. The utilization of
images of woman and images of sexuality in Orientalist discourse is treated
as a trope limited to the representation of Oriental woman and of sexuality.
In other words, neither the images of woman nor the images of sexual-
ity are understood as important aspects of the way Orientalist discourse is

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26 Colonial fantasies

structured. Rather, they are treated as belonging to a sub-domain of the

Orientalist discourse, thus implying a risk of mirroring the divisional, dis-
ciplinary, and expertise-oriented structure of Orientalism. Consequently,
we are left with, on the one hand, the representations of the Orient and
Oriental cultures, and on the other, representations of Oriental women and
of sexuality.43 When the articulation between the two levels is left unex-
plored, latent Orientalism, or the unconscious site of Orientalism, remains
a separate domain, clearly distinguishable from the realm of Orientalism as
scholarly discipline.
To engage in an analysis of the unconscious site of Orientalism should
not be seen as an alternative to its historical analysis. Indeed, if the power
of Orientalism is not, as vulgar Marxism would have it, a mere reflection
of an economic power, but is rather a power that is rooted in the produc-
tion and dissemination of knowledge, concepts, and commonsense, then we
must be able to root this knowledge itself in a certain libidinal economy that
drives it. Therefore we need to subject Orientalist discourse to a more
sexualized reading. By doing so we can understand how the representation
of otherness is achieved simultaneously through sexual as well as cultural
modes of differentiation. The Western acts of understanding the Orient
and its women are not two distinct enterprises, but rather are interwoven
aspects of the same gesture. Thus, in referring to the scene of the sexual and
the site of the unconscious, I do not simply mean the ways in which the
figure of the Oriental woman or Oriental sexuality is represented. I am
rather referring to the ways in which representations of the Orient are inter-
woven by sexual imageries, unconscious fantasies, desires, fears, and
dreams. In other words, the question of sexuality cannot be treated as a
regional one; it governs and structures the subject's every relation with the
other. Understanding this (double) articulation in Orientalist discourse
therefore requires an exploration of the articulation of the historical with
fantasy, the cultural with the sexual, and desire with power. It is this
connection that I want to elaborate in chapter 2. By organizing my inter-
rogation around the figure of the veil. I will try to show how the Orientalist
construction of the Orient is the Western subject's means of securing an
identity for itself mediated by the other. It therefore needs to be understood
as being structured by the fantasy framework in the Lacanian sense, which
provides the coordinates of the Subject's desire for the other. However,
before engaging in such an analysis, let me turn to Homi Bhabha's psycho-
analytic approach about the question of representation of cultural
difference in colonial discourse. Bhabha attempts to fill in the lacuna left by
Said's analysis, especially by addressing the questions regarding the
effectiveness of colonialism as a subject constituting practice and by artic-

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 Mapping the field 27

ulating the question of sexual difference to his analysis of colonial dis-

course.

The limits of Bhabha's analysis

The originality of Bhabha'a approach lies in the way he articulates the
problematic of cultural representation with the problematic of subjectivity.
This is an issue that Said drew to our attention but left unelaborated as he
was not granting sufficent attention to the notion of discourse deployed in
post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theories, namely the notion of dis-
course as a subject constituting practice.
In characterizing the mode of representation of otherness in the dis-
course of colonialism as polymorphous and perverse, Bhabha attempts to
capture the multiple and cross-cutting determinations of the constitution
of colonial subjectivity. Refusing to assume the nature of colonial dis-
course as unified and unidirectional (for it is not only the colonized but also
the colonizer who is simultaneously constituted in it) as Said does, Bhabha
discerns a productive ambivalence at the very center of colonial discourse.
Such an understanding avoids the pitfalls of assuming both the colonizer
and the colonized as fixed once and for all, and the colonial discourse as
being based on a final closure and ultimate coherence. On the contrary, it
designates the conflictual economy upon which colonial discourse is based.
The articulation of the Foucauldian model of subject constitution with
psychoanalytic theory enables Bhabha to understand the articulation of
history with fantasy, pleasure and desire with domination and power.
Understanding this articulation is necessary for understanding how the
subject of colonial discourse is constituted simultaneously in the field of a
disciplinary form of power (as it functions productively as incitement and
interdiction) and of fantasy.
Among other things, the novelty of Bhabha's analysis lies in his engage-
ment with the question of sexual difference in developing a theory of colo-
nial discourse. The concept of fetishism occupies a central place in Bhabha's
analysis of the ways in which colonial discourse operates. Before I discuss
Bhabha's adaptation of the formula of fetishism to colonial discourse, let
me first briefly explain the concept of fetishism in psychoanalysis.
Fetishism refers to a contradictory belief structure which enables the infant
to deal with the shocking discovery of sexual difference. The male infant
discovers that woman's/mother's body is different, for she does not have a
penis, and substitutes this lack with what thus later becomes a "fetish-
object." The fetish can be any object that can serve in place of the penis
with which the shocked male infant would complete the woman/mother.

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28 Colonial fantasies

The function of the fetish is to disavow the perception of difference. The

constitutive formula of fetishism is the statement, "I know very well, but
nevertheless . . . " In other words, the notion of fetishism refers to the struc-
ture of a belief which maintains a fantasmatic unity and sameness in the
face of contradiction and difference. The belief (that the woman/mother
does not have a penis) is retained, but it is also denied and is substituted
with a fetish object. This implies that the structure of fetishism as a contra-
dictory belief is always characterized by an ambiguity or ambivalence, by
a productive tension that results from the simultaneous recognition and
refusal of difference. It is this implication of fetishism that Bhabha is con-
cerned with.
In the construction of discriminatory knowledges, fetishism "provide[s]
a process of splitting and multiple/contradictory belief at the point of
enunciation and subjectification." 44 The ambivalence and splitting of colo-
nial discourse, reflected in its fetishistic mode of representation, can be
illustrated in the conflictual way pleasure and fear, strangeness and
familiarity, recognition and refusal of difference are articulated. The irrec-
oncilable logic of fetishism offers the subject of colonial discourse "a pri-
mordial either/or" structure which in turn facilitates its denial of
recognition of difference.
By applying the psychoanalytic theory of fetishism to explain the mode
of operation of colonial discourse, Bhabha elucidates the ways in which
cultural difference is represented. Bhabha translates "penis" into
skin/race/culture and formulates the following structure to explicate the
constitutive ambiguity in the articulation of otherness. As he puts it, "fet-
ishism is always a 'play' or vacillation between the archaic affirmation of
wholeness/similarity - in Freud's terms 'All men have penises,' in ours All
men have the same skin/race/culture; and the anxiety associated with lack
and difference' - again, for Freud 'Some do not have penises'; for ours
'Some do not have have the same skin/race/culture.'"45
Bhabha is certainly aware of the problems of translating the theory of
fetishism - which is developed primarily to understand the construction of
sexual difference - into the domain of colonial discourse as part of his
effort to understand the nature of the representation of cultural difference.
For example, he tries to delineate the significant differences between the
general (read sexual) theory of fetishism and his specific use of it for under-
standing the discourse of colonialism. First, he argues, that, unlike the
fetish of sexual difference, the fetish of colonial discourse is not a secret.
The skin, which is quite visible, is a key signifier of racial and cultural
difference and thus functions at the center of the racial drama which char-
acterizes the colonial encounter. Second, the fetish of cultural difference -

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unlike the sexual fetish which is registered as a "good object" and is lovable
and facilitates sexual pleasure - validates the colonial relation which is
based on power. Although Bhabha acknowledges the problem such a trans-
lation poses, the solution he offers for resolving it is a rather uninspired one.
For this purpose he goes back to Freud, who states that in the treatment of
the fetish, affection and hostility run parallel to each other, for they both
are based on disavowal and acknowledgment of castration. However,
Bhabha fails to recognize that the problems involved in transferring fetish-
ism from the domain of sexual difference to the question of cultural
difference are more complex than being two sides of the same coin. The
main reason why the perceived "lack" of woman/mother is disavowed and
then substituted for with another object is that such a lack poses a threat of
castration and hence induces fear and anxiety in men. One of the avenues
available to dissipate the anxiety provoked by castration is to substitute a
fetish object to disavow sexual difference. Given that "castration anxiety"
and hence the threat it constitutes is key in the theory of fetishism, it is not
clear how the perceived lack (all men do not have the same
skin/race/culture) of the cultural other constitutes a threat for the colo-
nizer. Moreover, it is not clear how a specific color is translated into lack.
Bhabha, in specifying the conditions and defining features of the dis-
course of colonialism, attempts to articulate the representation of sexual
difference with cultural difference. This is certainly a remarkable endeavor,
for most of the analyses of representation of difference ceaselessly repro-
duce the dualistic framework in which the representation of cultural
difference is treated as belonging to a separate domain, clearly distinguish-
able from the representation of sexual difference. And we should also
remember that Said's analysis was not free from this dualism. However,
despite Bhabha's efforts to breach this dualism and conjure up the much
more complicated nature of constitution of difference, he nevertheless
leaves the question of sexuality unexamined. He recognizes this problem in
a footnote, yet this does not quite help him in resolving the dualism in the
analysis of cultural and sexual difference. As Young rightly observes in
elaborating the structure of colonial discourse, the question of sexuality
and of sexual difference is elided in Bhabha's analysis. The question of a
gendered colonial subject is not worked out in detail, but simply regarded
as a metaphor of colonial ambivalence in Bhabha's analysis.46

A new binary: theoretical unity versus historical particularity

In recent years Said's work has stimulated a wide range of discussion and
hence has became an indispensable reference point for the work done in the

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30 Colonial fantasies

field of post-colonial theory. Not only the conceptual pairs of the colonized
and colonizer, West and East but also the term post-colonial have been met
with skepticism. In this section I would like to discuss the debates and
reasons surrounding this skepticism.
In a recent collection entitled Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory,41
critics such as Ela Shohat, Peter Hulme, and Anne McClintock point to the
pitfalls of using such general categories to account for the particular texts
produced in particular historical contexts. Criticisms voiced by Nicholas
Thomas in his recently published book Colonialism's Culture 48 and to a
certain extent by Robert Young in his Colonial Desire 49 are generally cen-
tered around the usefulness of the concept of colonial discourse as a
general category. The question of the legitimacy of employing colonial dis-
course or the colonized as a general category in dealing with a diversified
and heterogeneous phenomenon such as colonialism has been raised quite
frequently in the studies of colonial discourse.
It has been suggested that the prevalent perception of colonialism and of
colonial discourse is characterized in unitary and essentialized terms. By
evoking colonialism as a transhistorical and global phenomenon, such
terms not only imply a homogenizing vision of colonialism but also suggest
that colonialism was a coherent imposition, implying that it was all per-
vasively efficacious in dominating and assimilating the colonized.50 Such a
unitary understanding of colonialism also implies that the discourse of
colonialism operated identically across the colonized space and throughout
time.51 In this respect, it is claimed that by employing the Manichaean divi-
sion between self and other, colonizer and colonized, colonial discourse
theory perpetuates the terms and dominance established by colonial
history that it aims to scrutinize.52 Benita Parry criticizes colonial discourse
theory for being complicit with the postulates of colonial discourse,
because it retains colonialism's undifferentiated identity categories. In
opposition to this, she suggests that the range of possible subject positions
can never be wholly determined by any system of coercion. 53
Belief in the geographical homogeneity and all-encompassing nature of
colonialism has also been criticized on the grounds that by exaggerating
colonial power, colonial discourse studies elide the subjectivity of the col-
onized and the various forms of indigenous resistance against colonialism.
The question of agency and the concern for reinstating and recovering the
subjectivity of the colonized is reflected in attempts to revise Said's work,
which is believed not to foster an analysis of counter-histories, for it alleg-
edly implies that there is no alternative to Orientalism. Moreover, Said's
work is thought not to encourage inquiry into the actual and historically
specific conditions of colonialism.54 For Parry, by implying a totalizing

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potency for the colonial apparatus, colonial discourse theorists "misrepre-

sent the colonized as being produced as a stable category fixed in a position
of subjugation."55 This understanding, for her, precludes the possibility of
theorizing resistance and affirming the power of the reverse discourse and
anti-colonialist writing that subverts the colonial ideology. Similarly, for
Thomas, the prevalent understanding of colonial discourse entails a denial
of the sovereignity and autonomy of the colonized and fails to show how
colonial histories were shaped by indigenous resistance and contestation.
Thus for Thomas, subjectivity is elided in post-structuralism in general,
and in colonial discourse theory in particular. In contrast to this, he sug-
gests that emphasis should be placed on agency.56
This concern about undoing colonial discourse as a homogenizing cate-
gory and pointing to its historically specific articulations so as to give the
local and the particular due consideration can be regarded as the most
salient feature of Nicholas Thomas's work. A similar concern, though as
not quite strongly expressed, also prevails in Young's study. But it is impor-
tant to point out that, despite critiquing the lack of historical specificity
and the tendency of anti-Eurocentric theory to homogenize the Third
World and the West, Young is careful to avoid leaping into empirical and
geographical particularity. For example, he reminds us that Third World
theorists (such as Fanon, Said and others) felt it necessary to construct such
a general category in order to be able to constitute an object of analysis and
resistance. Moreover, he suggests that setting homogenization against his-
torical specificity and geographical particularity might imply repeating
colonialism's own partitioning strategies.57 To be able to delineate the
differences between the two critics it is important to discuss them separ-
ately.
Thomas's main interest is to localize and pluralize colonialism by his-
toricizing it. By suggesting that colonial projects and relationships are
inevitably fractured, he wants to point to the dispersed and conflicted char-
acter of colonial discourse and thereby challenge the common fundamental
division set between the colonizer and colonized, to undo the notion of
colonialism as a coherent object. In an effort to bring attention to the
complex, variable, and ambivalent nature of colonial ideologies, he aims to
reveal the enormous variation in different colonial contexts and different
historical moments. To historicize and pluralize colonialism, Thomas sug-
gests that we need to change our understanding of colonialism from a model
of signification to a model of narration or from a model of signs to a model
of practices, for there is always a gap between projection and performance
of colonialism. The endurance of colonial relations and their representa-
tional codes are not due to their reproduction as a structure, but due to

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32 Colonial fantasies

performance and practical mastery.58 For Thomas, such a dynamic model

of colonialism will allow us to identify not only the continuities but also the
failures, displacements and ruptures of colonial projects, for such projects
are continually constructed, misconstructed, adapted, and enacted. It is not
simply the fundamental division between the colonized and the colonizer,
but also the divison within the strategic colonizing projects and visions of
the civilizing mission (for example, assimilationist versus segregationist)
which inevitably fractures colonial projects and colonialists. Nor should we
assume that there is one overriding discourse at a particular time. Thus,
historicization of colonialism necessitates that we localize colonialism in
encounters so as not to see it as an inescapable system. By referring to the
inevitable fissure at the heart of colonialism, Thomas does not refer simply
to its degree of success or failure, but to the ways in which colonial projects
are altered, contested, adapted, and redefined by indigeneous societies, as
well as to the internal debates and contradictions within colonial projects.
Thomas is not unaware of the risk that such pluralization carries: the
danger of restricting analysis to mere empirical particularity. While he is
concerned with identifying the epistemological breaks and ruptures, and
hence with establishing the distinctiveness of different historical periods, he
is also careful to recognize continuity across periods and the ways in which
perception of otherness remains salient and available in varying degrees
over time.59 Thomas suggests that by describing the distinctive character-
istics of colonialist imagination of each period, we will avoid setting up a
binary opposition between empirical particularity and an essentialist idea
of Orientalism.60 But then one wonders whether this periodization is any
different from empirical particularity or from a designation of the peculiar
characteristics of different national styles fsay British versus French coloni-
alism) that Thomas himself does not necessarily endorse as a way of getting
out of the totalizing notion of colonialism. He suggests that although it
might be useful to identify the contrasts between French and British models
of colonialism, this can only be done at the expense of ignoring the diver-
sity within French and British practices. But we should ask to what extent
this emphasis on epochal frame or historical typification (or the designa-
tion of historical peculiarity) is useful in overcoming the problem of empir-
ical particularity. One is also tempted to ask, after this emphasis on internal
contradictions and debates within colonial ideologies, whether this histor-
ical typification does not also imply another unified or homogeneous
notion of colonialism. In other words, by doing this, does not one simply
displace the criterion for the unity of colonialism from space to time?
Although Thomas seems to promise a theory of colonialism that can acco-
modate multiple histories, cultures, and geographies, what we are offered

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eventually is a historicist periodization which is no less unifying than the

predominant conceptions of colonialism. Therefore, we can bring the same
objection to Thomas that he himself develops against the idea of contrast-
ing different national styles. The identification of the salient features of a
historical period can be made only at the expense of masking the diversity
and multiplicity within that specific period. Anticipating such a possible
objection Thomas develops his defense as follows: "At this heuristic level,
an analytical fiction that postulates distinctions between colonial epochs is
more valuable than a history of colonialism, though it needs to be under-
stood that such a fiction is a rhetorical device: it is constructed in order to
subvert easy totalities or progressive histories."61
If the designation of defining characteristics of an epoch can be treated
as a rhetorical device, why can one not also accept the general category of
colonialism as a rhetorical device? In other words, if the issue here is simply
a matter of constructing a rhetorical device, one wonders why totalizing
implications of one device but not the other is preferable and acceptable.
Does not this epochal rhetorical device disguise diversity? Although I am
not particularly concerned with the diversities existing within a historical
period, what I want to point out here is the sterility of the framework that
posits multiplicity as a solution to homogenization, essentialism or unity.
What I want to underline here is the impasse we hit when we imagine that
we can challenge essentialism when we simply reverse it and privilege multi-
plicity and plurality instead. I will try to elaborate this point further in the
following pages, but let me turn now to a discussion of Robert Young's
study.
In Colonial Desire Robert Young expresses his dissatisfaction with how
post-colonial criticism has constructed the colonizer and the colonized or
self and the other as two antithetical groups. For him, post-colonial crit-
icism tends to reproduce the static and essentialist categories that it aims to
dismantle by constructing such Manichean divisions. Questioning the legit-
imacy of colonial discourse as a general category, Young points to the
difficulty of avoiding the accusation of idealism involved in the use of such
a general category as a way of dealing with the "totality of discourses of
and about colonialism."62 Although he is prepared to accept that colonial-
ism was to a noticeable degree geographically and historically homogenous,
nonetheless he is not fully convinced that the category of colonial discourse
warrants its general use so as to imply that colonialism has operated every-
where in a similar enough way. The differences between French and British
colonialism, for example, as well as the varieties within racism, constitute
the basis of Young's reluctance to claim that theoretical paradigms of colo-
nial discourse analysis work equally well for all the different versions of

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34 Colonial fantasies

colonialism. For example, French colonialism, which was designed to

assimilate, was based on egalitarian Enlightenment assumptions of the
sameness of all human beings, and British colonialism, which was designed
for indirect rule, was based on the assumptions of difference and of
inequality. By pointing to this and other historical differences, Young aims
to point to the heterogeneity within colonial domination as well as the
different outcomes colonialism has given rise to. Young's study implies that
if we cannot confidently assume that colonial discourse operated identi-
cally across space and time then it becomes quite legitimate to question the
validity of a "general theoretical matrix that is able to provide an all-
encompassing framework for the analysis of each singular colonial
instance."63 However, Young is careful not to simply set homogenization
against the varieties of historical and geographical instances and thus drift
into empirical particularism as he acknowledges the necessity of con-
structing a general category such as colonialism to counter-attack the colo-
nial power. As Young acknowledges, the attempt to further develop the
theoretical parameters set by Said and others cannot be achieved simply by
producing new archival material.64 Indeed, especially in his chapter entitled
"Colonialism and Desiring Machine," where he applies Deleuze and
Guattari's framework and particularly the concepts of desire, machine,
territorialization, and reterritorialization, the necessity of using a general
and unified notion of colonialism becomes more visible.65 Here Young, fol-
lowing Deleuze and Guattari, characterizes colonialism as a machine,
as a determining and law-governing process. His endorsement of David
Trotter's understanding of "colonialism as a text without an author"
should be seen as part of the same attempt to emphasize the importance of
retaining the notion of colonialism as a general category.66 By designating
the role of capitalism as the determining motor of colonialism, Young con-
ceives the procedures of global capitalism as a form of cartography/inscrip-
tion or as a territorial writing machine in which the physical appropriation
of land and the seizure of cultural space are fundamental. But Young
warns us that such processes of appropriation and seizure should not be
understood as a simple destruction of native cultures or a simplistic graft-
ing of one culture onto the other. In an effort to point to the complexities
involved in such processes he proposes to see the decoding and recoding
processes (processes through which colonial practices are inscribed on the
territories and peoples subjected to colonial power) as a layering of cultures
on top of each other. Such imbrication of cultures with each other shows
that colonial culture never simply repeats itself. In other words, colonialism
is not a simple process of production of a new mimesis. When colonial cul-
tures are inscribed to colonized contexts, they are always translated and

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become hybridized and thus give rise to an "uncertain patchwork of iden-

tities" and produce "polymorphously perverse peoples who are white but
not quite." The term Young proposes to capture this complexity is
"palimpsestual inscription."67
This characterization of colonialism is in accordance with Young's
approval of Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity which he rightfully thinks
allows an understanding of colonial discourse as open to the trace of the
language of the other. Since the command of colonial authority does not
have a univocal grip on native cultures, it is important that we have con-
cepts to enable us to formulate how structures of domination are reversed,
and get translated and displaced. As Young correctly points out, the
concept of hybridity at the same time refers to a moment of challenge and
resistance and thus questions the validity of the essentializing logic of the
opposition set between colonizer and colonized. Hence Young recognizes
that Bhabha's characterization of colonial discourse as a production of
hybridity grasps the double logic upon which colonial discourse is based:
on the one hand, it hegemonizes and creates new structures, spaces, and
scenes and, on the other hand, it diasporizes, enables intervention, subver-
sion, translation, and transformation. In fact, Young tries to further elab-
orate the double logic of colonialism by introducing Jacques Derrida's
notion of "brisure" which refers to the moment of breaking and joining
simultaneously. Thus, for Young, hybridity is the concept that enables us to
understand how difference and sameness exist in an apparently impossible
simultaneity. As he suggests, "hybridity thus makes difference into same-
ness, and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no
longer the same, the different no longer simply different."68 It is this "binate
operation," for Young, which comprehends the simultaneous repetition
and subversion of colonialism.
Young's above formulation implies that he recognizes that Bhabha does
not simply suggest the pluralization of the concept of colonial discourse in
an effort to understand its potential subversion, for he formulates it in such
a way that it enables us to see the fracture, splitting, and multiplicity within
its consistency. Moreover, Young also acknowledges the usefulness of the
concept of ambivalance which Bhabha proposes as it "shows the different
kinds of framing that Western culture receives when translated into
different contexts."69 But let it suffice to mention here that despite Young's
acknowledgment of the use of the concept of hybridity and ambivalance,
he still insists on the necessity of understanding the historical specificity of
the discourse of colonialism. The problem is not simply Young's insistence
on specificity, but the formulation he proposes to achieve it. As if Young
himself has not already endorsed hybridity and ambivalance as enabling

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36 Colonial fantasies

the recognition of the differential articulations of colonialism (which in

fact should be taken as the recognition of its inescapably historically spe-
cific nature), towards the end of the book he suggests that we should
acknowledge the simultaneous working of other forms of racial distinction
alongside the model of the self-other. Being critical of the Hegelian dialec-
tic, Young suggests that racism or colonialism has not simply operated
according to the same-other or black and white model but was also based
on the "computation of normalities and degrees of deviance from the white
norm." 70 After recognizing the merits of the concepts of hybridity and
ambivalance, one is struck by the threadbareness of such a formulation
which claims to recognize the historically specific varieties of colonialism
and thus to avoid the problem of binarism and the totalizing gesture of the
theoretical paradigms of colonial discourse. What Young suggests implies
no more than a simple pluralization of the allegedly unified and totalizing
notion of colonial discourse. Any attempt to avoid the self/other, colo-
nized/colonizer, West/East opposition should not feel satisfied simply by
such pluralism. What we need instead is a theoretical framework, one that
is no less generalized than those already in existence, that will enable us to
show how colonial discourse can never be identical with itself, how it is
inevitably fractured within itself and never repeats itself identically as it
constitutes its unity; how it changes while it retains its hegemony and
adapts to different circumstances. In other words, the point is to show the
sameness within the difference of colonial discourse. Young himself also
tends to make a similar suggestion when he tries to understand the changes
that occurred in racist discourse. As he observes, the scientific theories mea-
suring cultural difference have always used earlier ideas whereby the multi-
ple meanings of race were grafted onto each other. This, he characterizes
as the oneiric logic of race theory which "allows it to survive despite its
contradictions, to reverse itself at every refutation, to adapt and transform
itself at every denial."71
The "computation of normalities and degrees of deviance from the white
norm" that Young suggests as a way of overcoming the binarism implied in
the Hegelian dialectical model of the same and the other is also quite
problematical. Such a model can be interpreted not simply as referring to
two antithetical groups, but more productively to understand a model
where the other represents the excluded site against which the subject con-
stitutes its identity. While being expelled from the privileged domain of sub-
jectivity, the other is nevertheless an integral part of the subject as its
effaced foundation. The force of this effacement ensures the subject's illu-
sory claims for self-sufficiency and self-certainty.72
The same-other dialectic should be taken as the prototype of an exclu-

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sionary scheme by which the subject is constituted as sovereign and

autonomous. Thus the very process of the computation of normalities and
degrees of deviance from a norm does not refer to a different mechanism,
but can be seen as one variant of the exclusionary scheme that the
same-other model designates. In other words, the so-called computation of
normalities and degrees of deviance do not refer to other forms of racial
distinction alongside the model of the self-other. Rather than multiplying
the variants of this model with an additive logic, we should emphasize that
the important point is to understand what is relegated to the status of
"outside the norm" is also produced in a mode of exclusion by the subject
who claims to be self-constituting.73 Such exclusions, be they in the form of
black and white, or computations of normalities, are all attempts at secur-
ing the seeming self-sufficiency of the subject.
If we return to the issue of the historical specificity and the recognition
of varieties of colonialism, the question that needs to be asked should be
about the gains we can achieve by an uncritical celebrating of colonialisms
instead of colonialism. Similiarly, we should also ask about the dangers
and risks such a pluralization implies. As Barker, Hulme, and Iversen warn
us, commitment to particularity does not imply rejection of the possibility
of generalization. In trying to avoid unity and homogeneity we should not
fall back into "obsession with specificities which can become another
empiricist fallacy in which all attempts to theorise are answered by the
supposedly irrefutable case of a counter-example."74 We should also
remember that in trying to bring into the picture the historically specific
articulations which colonial discourse supposedly homogenizes we are
introducing a new binarism, this time between the homogeneity and the
specificity of colonial discourse in the name of avoiding the Hegelian
model of the same and the other, the colonizer and the colonized. Thus the
supposed triumph of the totalizing notion of colonialism cannot be reme-
died by a straight reversal which celebrates historical particularity and
specificity. Such criticisms are made in the name of avoiding the essential-
izing and totalizing gesture of colonial discourse theory. But what such cri-
tiques ignore is that essentialism inheres precisely in binary opposition. In
this sense, a forthright reversal of the binary is far from interrupting the
economy that underpins it. As Vicki Kirby notes, "essentialism is not an
entity that can be identified and dissolved by saying yes or no to it."75
Rather, the question, as she suggests, should pertain to "the how" of
essentialism, to the ways in which "essence" is "made proper and natural-
ized within our thought or being."76
There are other good reasons also why we have to retain the general and
generalizing term colonialism. In talking about the term neocolonialism

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38 Colonial fantasies

Spivak notes that "historically these terms are always heterogeneous and so
is neocolonialism. You have to posit a great narrative in order to be able to
critique it."77 Similarly, Bruce Robbins suggests that we must avoid the
"easy generalization" and retain the right to formulate "difficult generaliza-
tions."78 Thus the first and foremost reason for posing such a generalized
category as colonialism is that it enables us to critique it.
In insisting on retaining the general category of colonial discourse or
colonialism, I am in no way suggesting we see its unity as a simple harmoni-
ous totality. Rather, what I am suggesting is that we see the complexity
within such a unity. As I try to show in chapter 3 it is the citationary nature
of orientalism that maintains its constancy, unity, and hegemony. Thus to
understand the complexity of the unity of colonialism and colonial dis-
course we need to conceive of it as a network of codes, imageries, signs, and
representations which serve as a reference system and function as a regu-
latory principle of a discursive regime that we can label as colonial. It is this
reference system or regulatory principle that facilitates the recognition of a
discourse as colonial. Thus colonial discourse should be seen as an epis-
teme in the Foucauldian sense. The colonial episteme is maintained by a
reiteration or citation of certain statements and representations. It is this
citational nature of colonial discourse that guarantees its "factual" status,
its "naturalness," while simultaneously concealing the conventions upon
which it is based. Paraphrasing Derrida in this context, white mythology or
colonial discourse is a process of erasure of the fabulous scene that has pro-
duced it. However, it is a "scene that nevertheless remains alive and stir-
ring."79 But if it is citationality that is essential in the sustenance of colonial
discourse, it at the same time constitutes the possibility of its subversion
and displacement. The repetition of the colonial dictum by the colonized,
taken outside its original context where it has been deployed as an instru-
ment of oppressive power, can pave the way for its differential articulation.
It is this potential subversive reiteration that Bhabha's formulation of colo-
nial discourse recognizes.80

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