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For a “Foreign” Audience: |
| Reprinted from the Middle East Studies
Association Bulletin, Summer 2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards). Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America |
| Recently Mary Louise Pratt suggested that we expunge the term ‘foreign’ as it applies to non-European languages and literature, and that we replace it with the term ‘modern,’ thereby “put[ting] an end to another lexical legacy of the Cold
War.”[1] I want to argue that, at least for the time being, replacing the term ‘foreign’ would be a dangerous masking, a denial of the realities of the encounters that, from my vantage point as an Arab and a professor of Arabic literature in the American academy, are still characterized by power inequalities, ignorance, and outright racism and hostility, encounters with ‘foreignness’ that must, at the very least, be apprehended as such. Arabic literature is primarily taught in this country in departments of Middle or Near Eastern Studies. Almost everyone in the humanities today is aware of how institutional structures of limited funding and resources, the distinctions between tenured, non-tenured, and adjunct faculty, the politics of publication and advancement, and so on affect the production of the knowledge that our students and readers are exposed to. In the case of Area Studies departments the problems are more acute. It is not simply that the resources are less, the support from the administration weaker, and the prestige at the bottom of the academic food chain, all of which are true. It is also that, when it comes to Area Studies, it becomes almost impossible for the American academy to be an arena of opposition and contestation. Edward Said traced the history of Area Studies departments in Orientalism over twenty years ago, and exposed the ways in which the knowledge they produce has served the interests of some at the expense of others, and has functioned to consolidate a world order, ‘new’ or ‘old’ does not seem to make much difference, of a privileged few, and a disenfranchised majority.[2] Today the situation has not improved much. In the absence of adequate funding from the universities themselves, Middle Eastern Studies departments and programs are still forced to go, hat in hand, to the State Department and/or wealthy oil sheiks, two entities whose interests often coalesce to determine, for example, which translation of the Qur’an is assigned, which variety of the Arabic language is taught, and so on. In these cases funding does not come with strings unattached. This funding may also be responsible for the strong anti-theoretical, primarily philological bent of most Middle Eastern Studies departments. Theory is after all dangerous to State Department and to oil sheik interests, precisely because it introduces issues such as the relations between knowledge and power, or discourse and the material world, the problematics of representation, the politics of location and reception, and so on. The result is a situation where European departments produce the theory, we provide the raw material; they set the parameters of discourse, we function as the native informants; they decide the subject, we offer, or become, the object. In addition, the umbrella term ‘Middle East’ does not serve as a rallying call for an empowering unity that transcends national and linguistic boundaries. It has not functioned as a basis for enabling agendas of resistance. The very appellation is a creation of colonialism, and people who live in these countries understand themselves to be ‘Middle Easterners’ only in relation to the West, and use the term primarily within the context of discussions of geopolitical considerations and configurations of world powers. Their own self-designated parameters of identity would not include this category. Departments of Middle Eastern Studies are usually composed of scholars working on different ‘regions’ within the area, each within one language, and these scholars are more often than not more interested in and more capable of talking to colleagues in other departments, such as English literature, than with one another. That is how you move from the local to the universal, from the ghetto to the center. That is how you become a ‘cosmopolitan intellectual!’ The self-violence and colonial barriers which divide the different peoples in the physical ‘Middle East’ are reenacted within the space of the American academy, and these departments amount to a number of individual scholars who have been forcibly lumped together as a matter of convenience for powers that need to look at the countries they focus on as one region. The ghettoization of these departments within the American academy parallels the disenfranchisement of the cultures they represent in the power games on the world arena, and their lack of inner cohesion and solidarity is reminiscent of the sad divisions between the different nation states of the Middle East. Like many ‘third-world’ peoples, we in the Middle East, and in Middle Eastern Studies, have mostly lost the ability to talk with one another in any language other than English (occasionally French), and in reference to any terms outside those set by western discourses. It is rare indeed that we encounter one another and experience each other’s cultural productions without the mediation of the West.[3] For example, I know no Hebrew, Turkish, or Armenian, but my English and French are reasonable, and the only reason I learnt some Persian, to be quite honest, is because it was required by my department at that formidable American university, Harvard, where I did my graduate studies. In that I am quite representative of the field, I think. But the fact that I am forced to rely on English translations to experience, say, a Turkish novel troubles me, not because I hold on to the belief that only cultural insiders who read the material in the original language can understand it or are authorized to represent it. Rather, my anxiety stems from my knowledge, through my first-hand experience in dealing with translations from Arabic, that the works that make it into English, and the English forms they take, offer more insights into the politics of reception in the host culture than the cultural dynamics of the originating one. At best, what makes it into English replicates an elitist and hegemonic canon in the original culture, more often it creates an alternative canon that privileges works easily consumed by Western audiences because they reinforce preexisting stereotypes and misconceptions. A number of young scholars have begun to focus on this phenomenon, trying to understand, for example, why a figure like Nawal al-Sadaawi, by no means an important novelist in the Arab world, is the most widely translated and taught Arab writer in the English language, whereas more important women writers are barely known here. They also are looking at the subtle and not so subtle changes that happen to these texts on their migration route: titles change, covers change, arrangement of material changes, and so on. For example, whereas the Arabic equivalent of al-Sadaawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve starts with a strong condemnation of imperialism, the American version starts with a gruesomely detailed description of a clitoridectomy. Not an innocent change, and not one without implications.[4] The issue is not that the West should not know that the Arab world is less than perfect. The real problem is that in the process of translation and reception, texts that are oppositional within their cultures, because they address the concerns of those disenfranchised in their own societies, become collaborative with systems of oppression in the adopting culture, validating and legitimizing already held beliefs that ‘those Arabs’ mistreat their women, have racist inclinations, violent natures, and so on, and are therefore still very much in need of the civilizing power of Western culture. Change locations and you dramatically change the relationship between these texts and structures of power: from confrontational to collaborative, oppositional to complicitous. No longer shocking their readers out of their apathy and prejudices, they now simply confirm what we always knew about ‘those people.’ Thus, in addition to the issue of which texts are physically available in English, there is the question of how those texts are read. A properly nuanced understanding of a text requires situating it within a field of relations and connections, literary and extra-literary. The problem is not just that American students are encountering a reduced text because of their lack of awareness of its various contexts, but that the contexts they will almost inevitably relate the text to are their own prior ‘experiences’ of the Arab through the media, cartoons, New York Times editorial, and so forth. When an American student registers for a course in Arabic literature, his or her ultimate goal is to figure out the essence of this category, and to comprehend how each text ‘reflects’ Arab reality. This approach is not true just of the students who unabashedly list as reasons to take the course: preparation for a career at the CIA or State Department or IMF, or professions that will cater to the project of globalized capital, but also of the sweet undergraduates who really want to learn about other cultures and make this a better and more humane world. Even when one reminds them of the ways in which literature works, when one talks about paradox, irony, parody, fantasy, and so on, and consistently makes comparisons with experiences familiar to them, they are still desperate, at the end of the day, to make the jump from knowing this Arab text to knowing ‘the Arab.’ The mimetic model of simple reflection is almost unbeatable when encountering foreign texts, and even for the sophisticated student, the ‘authenticity’ and ‘fidelity’ or the representation to a ‘culturally typical’ original experience becomes the litmus test for the text. I am sure that part of the answer is not simply to give the students more, and more accurate, information, but to make them aware of their own positionality vis-à-vis the material they are reading, of how the material reaches them, how they consume it, and how their consumption of it is a power-allocating activity. The ultimate goal might be to gently lead them to shift vantage points, at least momentarily, and to stop using their own culture and their own self-interest as the primary point of reference. If that is not possible, then they should be made aware, if they are going to pronounce judgments, of the hidden motives and limitations of these judgments. If they are unwilling to entertain a critique of the Kantian notion of the universality of the aesthetic, let them at least consider how Eurocentrism masks itself as universal precisely by claiming that imitation of western models is a solution for one and all. But while relativizing can be a powerful antidote to the belief in one culture’s superiority, it runs the risk of depoliticizing intellectual activity, and promoting an attitude of ‘laissez faire’ which is not the road to commitment. The balance one needs, perhaps, is to both condemn what one sees as morally problematic (clitoridectomy, if I stick to my earlier example) while simultaneously condemning the manipulative and self-interested condemnation of that same behavior. This is a difficult and sometimes messy position (talk about taking the moral high ground) but one that allows for being simultaneously honest and taking account of the politics of location. To conclude: retaining the term ‘foreign’ is at least a reminder that one is embarking on an encounter that is demanding and challenging, for which one does not already possess all the necessary clues. Apprehending that one is a member of a ‘foreign’ audience may, I hope, produce, rather than condescension, a certain humility that is the first step towards respect. For scholars of non-European languages and literatures who are writing and teaching in English, always remembering that one is mediating between texts and their ‘foreign’ audiences is crucial. Otherwise, we become like all those scholars who have shed the term ‘Orientalist’ with impunity, running around calling themselves ‘Arabists,’ ‘Persianists,’ and so on, and meanwhile going on with business as usual. New names, old games. Before we drop lexical legacies and change the names, let us work harder on changing the games. |
| *Author’s note: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the MLA 1999 convention in Chicago, as part of the Presidential Forum on “Scholarship and Commitment,” and at the literary workshop on “Middle Eastern Literature and the West” at Washington University in St. Louis in October 2000. I would like to thank Professors Edward Said and Fatemeh Keshavarz respectively for inviting me to these two events, as well as the audience and participants for their valuable comments and spirited discussion. [1] Mary Louise Pratt, “Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship,” in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 64. [2] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). [3] In our Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department at Columbia University, we are trying hard to battle this tendency through team-teaching courses that cover more than one geographical or linguistic area within the department, and encouraging students to do more comparative work between our areas rather than with the more traditional English or French. Recently we voted that students could choose as one of their ‘research languages’ one of the languages we cover in the department. This decision was not without internal opposition by those who continue to believe that Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, and so forth cannot possibly be ‘research languages,’ those being restricted to German and French. [4] Amal Amireh, “Framing Nawal el Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational Context,” Signs 20.1 (2000). Other scholars who are working on this issue of the politics of translation and reception are Hosam Aboul-Ela, Nancy Coffin, Jenine Dallal, Lisa Suhair Majaj, and Therese Saliba. |
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