One of the most important post-colonial thinkers and critics of orientalism is Palestinian-American Edward Said. In the Introduction to his book Orientalism, he sets off with an attempt to define what Orientalism is. According to Said, the term embraces a large scope of meanings and approaches, which, in one way or another, refer to the Western ideas about the East, and are inextricably interdependent. These ideas and projections are always influenced by the relation of power, with the East deemed inferior. Said specifies those instances in three main thought lines.
Firstly, Orientalism can be seen as a way for the West of "coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience" (Said 61). Orient is not merely there, but by being Europe's long time colonies, it has also become the source of its culture, against which the Westerner defines himself. And by being a part of the European economy, and thus its materialistic culture, the Orient has become "a mode of discourse with all the supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles". Secondly, Orientalism is a way of thinking in terms of differentiation, both ontological and epistemological. Here Said introduces the term "the Occident", meaning that the Western world used in the the discourse as opposed to the Orient (and vice versa) is automatically represented as the model against which "the Other" is constructed. This approach underlines centuries of Western writing, art, philosophy, politics, economics and almost any other discipline where theory is involved. The third definition proposed by Said is concerned with the relationship between the academic and the imagined Orient. He holds that since eighteen century these two notions always, in greater or lesser degree, have influenced one another. That relationship, or as Said nicely puts it "the traffic between the two" has ever since been regulated by various means of bureaucratic or pedagogic intervention of the West. It is a mode of exercising Western authority, as well as a mode of "producing" the Orient for, and through the perspective of, the West. Said maintains that this form of Orientalism is so prevalent and influential that it is almost impossible to speak about the Orient without acknowledging the limits of Orientalism on both theory and action (for example military) - "in brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action"(62).
Following this brief categorization, Edward Said sets upon adding additional comments, facts and figures to clarify the above mentioned assumptions. First and foremost he repudiates the idea that the Orient is only the projection of the Occident without any corresponding reality. All the ideas that fund the basis of Orientalism do, or did exist at some point in history, somewhere in the world, and possibly in the East (as well as it might have been in the West). However, the Western focus on these specific differences - including the brutal, as well as the imaginary and exotic aspects - brought very little contribution to the study apart from simple acknowledgement of things as they are. Here Said does not wish to study the relation between Orientalism and Orient, but draws another connection - between "Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient", which are either too exaggerated or have nothing to do with the "real" Orient itself - and stresses that the study of Orient (Orientalism) - is based on the ideas and assumptions rather than deals with the subject. Further, Said argues that cultures and histories can not be understood without taking into consideration their "configurations of power", and that the West has always executed its hegemony over the East. Said promptly quotes K.M.Panikkar, who writes in his book Asia and Western Dominance, that the East was not "orientalized because it was discovered to be oriental, but because it could be made oriental"(as qtd. in Said 64). Last but no least, said refutes any claims that Orientalism should be seen as a mere Western fantasy or a collection of false assumptions, guarded for the sake of positioning in a superior position. Instead, rather than a "verdict", Orientalism is a system of knowledge through which the West imposes its hegemony over the East, with a "considerable material investment"(64). This investment practised over centuries, allowed the assumptions of Orientalism to enduringly permeate all aspects of cultural, political and economical activity where The East and the West are involved. Said then describes in more detail how the west maintains its relationship of superiority.
In what follows, Said focuses on the source of Orientalism and distinguishes two: "the general group of ideas overriding the mass of material" and individual writers. For the reason of avoiding too much "distortion and inaccuracy" he concludes the two views are equally valid and interdependent. He then expounds further on the previously mentioned "three aspects of contemporary reality"(65).
Ann Cooper Albright in her essay Embodying History: Epic Narrative and Cultural Identity in African-American Dance focuses specifically on African-American dance in the United States through the scope of post-colonial theory. She introduces the term New Epic Dance to describe the practices of African-American contemporary choreographers who include in their work elements of common struggle of the enslaved culture as well as personal aspect of coming to terms with the history in the contemporary Western world. These New Epic dances are theatrical performances which tell stories of people torn between two cultures, in a celebratory, rather than martyrish way, and shed the light of hope for blissful future. Their narratives are based on historical and mythical ideas that express each artist's personal cultural identity against a larger scope of social and historical images of many dimensions, they "balance realism and performative spectacle"(165). Albright clarifies the term epic in dance as different from the Western Homeric meaning in that latter generally praises the main hero and his conquest, whereas the former celebrate the people who survived the struggle against the oppression of their conquerors. She then outlines two conditions for these stories to be historically meaningful. Firstly, they must have a "sense of truth" and secondly, they have to create a "sense of community between speakers and listeners"(151). She cites Toni Morrison's distinction between truth and fact as crucial in providing the power to those stories: "facts can exists without human intelligence, but truth cannot"(151). The interaction between the speaker and the listener, or most importantly the fact that the listener must be there for the storytelling to happen, and he must engage in the act of understanding to give the story its meaning - makes these (hi)stories per formative in their character.
Ann Cooper Albright illustrates her point by describing two African-American dance performances: Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company's Last supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin from 1990 and Urban Bush Women's Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story from 1995. The first one is based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin from 1852 and, according to the maker Bill T.Jones, tells a story "about being human, about how we are the places we have been, the people we have slept with. How we are what we have lost and what we dream for"(as qtd. in Albright 159). Albright in her analysis falls back on theories by Michael Awkward, and Larry Neal who advocates that the understanding of African-American dance is not created through affiliation with a certain cultural group, but by close and comprehensive examination of the work, therefore it can be learnt. She quotes Trinh T. Minh-Ha who, while making distinction between "I" (the post-colonial) and "they" (the west), situates the relationships between the two as "ours"(155). Albright makes a point about the constant "re-" doing, creating, presenting, framing of the memory as a technique inherent in this form of art. She also emphasises the connection between "performing body's public visibility" and "the slave's body inevitable purchasability"recalling a scene from the show when a slave, after entertaining his future master with a grotesque dance, is purchased.
The other performance Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story is based on a lesbian vampire novel by Jewelle Gomez of similar title (also, notice the playfulness of "a" instead of original "the") - The Gilda Stories: A Novel from 1991. In the performance Gilda teaches the Girl through dance to understand her history in order to move on to the future. The recurrent in the novel motif of exchanging blood, on stage symbolises the flux of motion and spirituality as well as the energy connecting the dancing women. That also signifies the exchange of memory between the dancers and the audience, for "many experiences of exclusion and oppression, as well as inclusion and community, are shared across cultural differences". Because the choreography represents experiences of specific social group - i.e. African-American women - it can be considered what the scholar Veta Goler calls a "cultural autobiography" of the choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (174). Albright emphasises the parallel between the European romantic novel genre (which has already been deconstructed in Gomez's book) and the performance portraying its main characters as spiritual teachers, which in turns reflects on the Western cultural and imperial hegemony.
In the end I will shortly overview the post-colonial approaches that Mark Fontier discusses in his book Theory / Theatre. An introduction. Aside from formerly mentioned Edward Said, Fortier brings up the most influential thinkers of post-colonialism. One of them is American based Indian Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who introduced the term "sub-altern" referring to the colonised nations and individuals who are always deemed inferior and have someone else speaking on their behalf. Another Indian scholar Homi Bhabha focuses on how the language, with stereotype at the basis of its structure (positive and negative associations with black and white) discriminates against non-European people (Fortier 195). Previously quoted by Ann Cooper Albright, the Vietnamese-American Trinh T. Minh-Ha is interested in the hybridity of the post-colonial subject, the representation of women, as well as in ways in which she can represent herself in her art for which she chose film as the medium of expression. In the discussion about multi- and interculturalism, Fortier names Rustam Bharucha as one of its strongest critics. His main object of criticism are Western makers such as Peter Brook with his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bharucha puts forward two contentions: one, that the power relationship between the West and the East is so out of balance that a fair exchange is not possible. And second, that "interculturalism always displaces traditions from where they really mean something"(202). In the field of pedagogy, Paulo Freire is one of the most notable post-colonial theories. In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed from 1970 he "aligns political oppression with oppressive pedagogy" meaning that, the position of the oppresses is the "sub-altern" position of students who are indoctrinated with the one truth of the so-called teachers while being considered to have nothing to contribute from their own. Freire proposes "dialectical pedagogy" instead, where the oppressed are allowed to learn for themselves and from their own experience rather than through rules, customs and ways of thinking imposed on them by those in a more privileged situation. Together with Henry Giroux, they introduced the notion of "border pedagogy" in which people bring their knowledge and experience from various cultures and "develop a comparative sense of the relations between different environments and ways of knowing" (208). Mark Fortier further exemplifies the above theories on the example of specific performances or general approaches taken by such theatre makers as Aime Cesaire, Wole Soyinka, David henry Hwang, Tomson Highway, Augusto Boal, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena.
Works Cited
Cooper Albright, Ann. Choreographing difference: the body and identity in contemporary dance. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1997.
Fortier, Mark. Theory / Theatre. An introduction. Second edition. London / New York: Routledge, 2002.
Said, Edward. "Orientaism.Introduction."Repertoirekennis Dans Reader. Utrecht University, 2010.
Following this brief categorization, Edward Said sets upon adding additional comments, facts and figures to clarify the above mentioned assumptions. First and foremost he repudiates the idea that the Orient is only the projection of the Occident without any corresponding reality. All the ideas that fund the basis of Orientalism do, or did exist at some point in history, somewhere in the world, and possibly in the East (as well as it might have been in the West). However, the Western focus on these specific differences - including the brutal, as well as the imaginary and exotic aspects - brought very little contribution to the study apart from simple acknowledgement of things as they are. Here Said does not wish to study the relation between Orientalism and Orient, but draws another connection - between "Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient", which are either too exaggerated or have nothing to do with the "real" Orient itself - and stresses that the study of Orient (Orientalism) - is based on the ideas and assumptions rather than deals with the subject. Further, Said argues that cultures and histories can not be understood without taking into consideration their "configurations of power", and that the West has always executed its hegemony over the East. Said promptly quotes K.M.Panikkar, who writes in his book Asia and Western Dominance, that the East was not "orientalized because it was discovered to be oriental, but because it could be made oriental"(as qtd. in Said 64). Last but no least, said refutes any claims that Orientalism should be seen as a mere Western fantasy or a collection of false assumptions, guarded for the sake of positioning in a superior position. Instead, rather than a "verdict", Orientalism is a system of knowledge through which the West imposes its hegemony over the East, with a "considerable material investment"(64). This investment practised over centuries, allowed the assumptions of Orientalism to enduringly permeate all aspects of cultural, political and economical activity where The East and the West are involved. Said then describes in more detail how the west maintains its relationship of superiority.
In what follows, Said focuses on the source of Orientalism and distinguishes two: "the general group of ideas overriding the mass of material" and individual writers. For the reason of avoiding too much "distortion and inaccuracy" he concludes the two views are equally valid and interdependent. He then expounds further on the previously mentioned "three aspects of contemporary reality"(65).
Ann Cooper Albright in her essay Embodying History: Epic Narrative and Cultural Identity in African-American Dance focuses specifically on African-American dance in the United States through the scope of post-colonial theory. She introduces the term New Epic Dance to describe the practices of African-American contemporary choreographers who include in their work elements of common struggle of the enslaved culture as well as personal aspect of coming to terms with the history in the contemporary Western world. These New Epic dances are theatrical performances which tell stories of people torn between two cultures, in a celebratory, rather than martyrish way, and shed the light of hope for blissful future. Their narratives are based on historical and mythical ideas that express each artist's personal cultural identity against a larger scope of social and historical images of many dimensions, they "balance realism and performative spectacle"(165). Albright clarifies the term epic in dance as different from the Western Homeric meaning in that latter generally praises the main hero and his conquest, whereas the former celebrate the people who survived the struggle against the oppression of their conquerors. She then outlines two conditions for these stories to be historically meaningful. Firstly, they must have a "sense of truth" and secondly, they have to create a "sense of community between speakers and listeners"(151). She cites Toni Morrison's distinction between truth and fact as crucial in providing the power to those stories: "facts can exists without human intelligence, but truth cannot"(151). The interaction between the speaker and the listener, or most importantly the fact that the listener must be there for the storytelling to happen, and he must engage in the act of understanding to give the story its meaning - makes these (hi)stories per formative in their character.
Ann Cooper Albright illustrates her point by describing two African-American dance performances: Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company's Last supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin from 1990 and Urban Bush Women's Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story from 1995. The first one is based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin from 1852 and, according to the maker Bill T.Jones, tells a story "about being human, about how we are the places we have been, the people we have slept with. How we are what we have lost and what we dream for"(as qtd. in Albright 159). Albright in her analysis falls back on theories by Michael Awkward, and Larry Neal who advocates that the understanding of African-American dance is not created through affiliation with a certain cultural group, but by close and comprehensive examination of the work, therefore it can be learnt. She quotes Trinh T. Minh-Ha who, while making distinction between "I" (the post-colonial) and "they" (the west), situates the relationships between the two as "ours"(155). Albright makes a point about the constant "re-" doing, creating, presenting, framing of the memory as a technique inherent in this form of art. She also emphasises the connection between "performing body's public visibility" and "the slave's body inevitable purchasability"recalling a scene from the show when a slave, after entertaining his future master with a grotesque dance, is purchased.
The other performance Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story is based on a lesbian vampire novel by Jewelle Gomez of similar title (also, notice the playfulness of "a" instead of original "the") - The Gilda Stories: A Novel from 1991. In the performance Gilda teaches the Girl through dance to understand her history in order to move on to the future. The recurrent in the novel motif of exchanging blood, on stage symbolises the flux of motion and spirituality as well as the energy connecting the dancing women. That also signifies the exchange of memory between the dancers and the audience, for "many experiences of exclusion and oppression, as well as inclusion and community, are shared across cultural differences". Because the choreography represents experiences of specific social group - i.e. African-American women - it can be considered what the scholar Veta Goler calls a "cultural autobiography" of the choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (174). Albright emphasises the parallel between the European romantic novel genre (which has already been deconstructed in Gomez's book) and the performance portraying its main characters as spiritual teachers, which in turns reflects on the Western cultural and imperial hegemony.
In the end I will shortly overview the post-colonial approaches that Mark Fontier discusses in his book Theory / Theatre. An introduction. Aside from formerly mentioned Edward Said, Fortier brings up the most influential thinkers of post-colonialism. One of them is American based Indian Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who introduced the term "sub-altern" referring to the colonised nations and individuals who are always deemed inferior and have someone else speaking on their behalf. Another Indian scholar Homi Bhabha focuses on how the language, with stereotype at the basis of its structure (positive and negative associations with black and white) discriminates against non-European people (Fortier 195). Previously quoted by Ann Cooper Albright, the Vietnamese-American Trinh T. Minh-Ha is interested in the hybridity of the post-colonial subject, the representation of women, as well as in ways in which she can represent herself in her art for which she chose film as the medium of expression. In the discussion about multi- and interculturalism, Fortier names Rustam Bharucha as one of its strongest critics. His main object of criticism are Western makers such as Peter Brook with his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bharucha puts forward two contentions: one, that the power relationship between the West and the East is so out of balance that a fair exchange is not possible. And second, that "interculturalism always displaces traditions from where they really mean something"(202). In the field of pedagogy, Paulo Freire is one of the most notable post-colonial theories. In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed from 1970 he "aligns political oppression with oppressive pedagogy" meaning that, the position of the oppresses is the "sub-altern" position of students who are indoctrinated with the one truth of the so-called teachers while being considered to have nothing to contribute from their own. Freire proposes "dialectical pedagogy" instead, where the oppressed are allowed to learn for themselves and from their own experience rather than through rules, customs and ways of thinking imposed on them by those in a more privileged situation. Together with Henry Giroux, they introduced the notion of "border pedagogy" in which people bring their knowledge and experience from various cultures and "develop a comparative sense of the relations between different environments and ways of knowing" (208). Mark Fortier further exemplifies the above theories on the example of specific performances or general approaches taken by such theatre makers as Aime Cesaire, Wole Soyinka, David henry Hwang, Tomson Highway, Augusto Boal, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena.
Works Cited
Cooper Albright, Ann. Choreographing difference: the body and identity in contemporary dance. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1997.
Fortier, Mark. Theory / Theatre. An introduction. Second edition. London / New York: Routledge, 2002.
Said, Edward. "Orientaism.Introduction."Repertoirekennis Dans Reader. Utrecht University, 2010.