Neoliberal Orientalism
In discussions of art and cultural production in and from the Arab world, neoliberal orientalism structures a set of expectations and a framework for political representation closely tied to the discourse of resistance. As discussed previously, the discourse of resistance depoliticizes – or strips politics from – musicians and their work while celebrating what seems like exciting political content or voice. I am interested, as Edward Said was in his famous work, in recognizing a systemic way of representing the Arab world that makes Arab artists objects of desire and the places they call home exotic spaces of experimentation. In this, a specific political terminology is used to cast some young Arabs as new figures of dissent and revolution and the places they call home hip spaces of hybrid authenticity. The effect of this representation is to depoliticize by liberalizing the spaces, discourses, and actors involved.
My exploration of how neoliberal orientalism functions politically is encouraged by performance scholar Eng-Beng Lim’s recent critiques of how celebrations of culture in post-colonial contexts can depoliticize Asian subjects. His identification of representations of exotic familiarity that tease and comfort a “Western gaze that cannot help trolling the world for the signs” of alternative culture “while expressing incredulity at what similarities can be found” is central to my own arguments about how curatorial frameworks limit, depoliticize, and dehumanize Arab artist-subjects.[1] In the larger book project from which I am pulling here, I consider that the orgiastic enthusiasm about so-called hybrid artistic expression and cultural production in the Arab world – like Arabic rap and hip hop, graffiti, or street art (wherein the uniquely modern expression of rap is erroneously seen as incongruous with a traditional and conservative Arab ‘street’)– is a concrete archive of this attempt to tame emergent and unknown politics by putting them in familiar and non-threatening frames.[2] We thus see in the mainstream press around the uprisings associated with the “Arab Spring” an overwhelming emphasis on new forms of “non-violent” creative expression (like rap, but also a range of performance and visual art work). The enthusiasm about the role of some technology (as in ‘Facebook and Twitter Revolutions’) is related to this phenomenon. In the years after the Uprisings, art and academic curation continue to frame art “as resistance” in Arab contexts.
Lim’s attention to how liberal economic policy – but also art criticism, academic study, and activism – may re-inscribe “stereotypes even where they don’t apply in order for the critique to make sense to a western audience” encourages careful, critical attention to the racial representations that make Arab others “readable” to specific audiences.[3] This requires consideration even if the intention behind those representations is offered in a spirit of enthusiasm or solidarity.
Neoliberal orientalism mobilizes a discourse of resistance to cast a specific net of possibilities for the politics in Arab cultural production, wherein the artist and her audiences should resist, subvert, break with, or otherwise critique some aspect of the existing order. This discourse of resistance sticks in particular ways to Arab artists and ethnographic subjects, something that has been critiqued thoroughly by anthropologists Jessica Winegar, Saba Mahmood, and Lila Abu-Lughod in their diverse projects over the past two decades.[4] Art historians like Claire Bishop have also traced this proclivity for framing certain artists as “resistant” to the curation of artwork from former Soviet Block countries leading up to and after the fall of the Iron Curtain.[5] Despite the long history of these critiques, the enthusiasm about resistance and the instinct to look for, locate, and present or curate it to specific audiences continues.
The particular articulation of the discourse of resistance vis-à-vis Arab artists I am interested in roughly coincides with the expansion of the War on Terror and the shift in globalizing culture markets associated with the rise of neoliberalism. As such, the phrase neoliberal orientalism offers a specific divergence from the framework Edward Said made popular with his landmark 1978 text. In this proposal, I am building on critiques of Said that question the plausibility of his proposal to apply a Foucauldian discourse to 2,000 years of cultural production from Aeschylus to Flaubert.[6] Instead, I locate a specific “distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic [and] scholarly” texts that express “a certain will or intention to understand” the Arab/Muslim other that correspond with a particular socio-political moment and that reflect the cultures of exchange attached to it.[7] That is, neoliberal orientalism adheres to contemporary political constructions, ambitions, anxieties, and debates and works differently from the orientalism which one may also find in either ancient Greece or the colonial period of the 18th and 19th centuries. Moreover, considering the existence this neoliberal articulation of orientalism allows me to illustrate patterns of the construction of Arab and Muslim others that is less attached to geographic location (West/East) than it is affiliated with economic class and other assemblages of material access. In this way, we can see how a certain taming and framing of Arab politics and cultural production is in some cases furthered by Arab curators in the non-West, in the burgeoning art and cultural centers of Beirut, Dubai, Cairo and across the so-called Global South. Neoliberal orientalism thus points to patterns of representation that, while borrowing, building, and perpetuating racial stereotyping is inextricably bound up with neoliberal class construction. In this way, the orientalization of class emerges as an important cross section through debates about political struggle and cultural representation in the art and activist centers of the Global South and Global North alike.
In future posts, the depoliticizing effects of neoliberal orientalism are explored through a consideration of the stickiness of violence in cultural representations. This is examined as an effect of the bleeding of cultural representations through from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror (and vice versa).
[1] Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (New York: New York UP, 2013), 121.
[2] I am building here on Timothy Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007), see especially Chapter 5.
[3] Ibid., 184.
[4] Jessica Winegar, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005); Lila Abu-Lughod, “‘The Romance of Resistance’: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17(1990): 41-55.
[5] Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012).
[6] Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992), 159-220.
[7] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: 1978), 12.