Presentation of a new translation of Edward Said’s book Orientalism

The territory inhabited by the Turkmen tribes was one of the last lands included in the entity of the Russian Empire.

The process of identity formation was a prerequisite for the systematization of imperial spaces. In this particular period, the Orientalists were obliged to summarize knowledge about Turkmen tribes. They used various methods to define Turkmen culture, language, and social structure. However, those methods were based on a clear understanding of Turkmen culture as a part of broader categories such as the Muslim community or the Persian world, the wild nomad world and the ruins of ancient cultures, races, and nations.

At first glance, this description is a copy of the main argument of Orientalism. Total control over a local community was a reason for building an imaginary world of meanings. Said’s concepts can be relevant as a starting point for the deconstruction of those meanings. But the detailed and nuanced study of divergent practices used by Orientalists and other communities can reveal a more heterogeneous structure of their intentions.

Anton Ikhsanov’s presentation is based on the study of newspaper discussions between the Russian colonial administrators, Orientalists, and Tatar intellectuals on the meanings behind Turkmen culture. The main focus of attention is on the link between practices, career paths, and “convictions.” This link was a productive basis for building the lenses with which to look at the Turkmen community. The most important point among the arguments used by the various sides is the reference to Turkmen intellectuals as a source of knowledge regarding Turkmen culture.

In 2006, the first Russian translation of Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism was published in St. Petersburg.

It includes as an afterword an article by Russian nationalist writer and journalist Konstantin Krylov, which argues that the Russian people and Russia are, in fact, the main object of Orientalization by Western powers. Various commentators have been taken aback by Krylov’s remarks and some have suggested that he did not understand Said’s book. Professor Vera Tolz’s presentation will provide the historical context and explain the historical roots of Krylov’s view which, as will be shown, reflects a long tradition, starting with the Slavophiles of the 1840s. Within this tradition, Russian thinkers have been developing their own critique of what they perceive as the destructive nature of Western colonialism, which in 1978 Said made central to his much-celebrated book. The lecture will consider how the specific views of prominent Russian thinkers on Russia’s own and Europe’s relationships with the peoples of “the East” account for the unpopularity of the postcolonial perspective in public discourse in today’s Russia, and how it hinders a critical interrogation of the nature of Russian (and Soviet) state-building practices.

In Persophilia:  Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Harvard, 2015) Hamid Dabashi proposed and mapped out in historical detail how the devil of Orientalism is in the details of Persophilia.

Not just a generic European colonial interest in the Orient but a site specific and detailed assessment of European Persophilia is what we need to bring the two sides of the false binary together. Two seminal thinkers are at the roots of this proposal: we need to look through the corrective lens of Jürgen Habermas’ seminal work on the structural transformation of the European bourgeois public sphere and of Viktor Shklovsky’s pioneering idea of estrangement (otstranenie). Seen through these two crucial perspectives together, Said’s classic articulation of the legacy of Orientalism will have to be corrected in two corollary ways. Colonial knowledge production was not a one-way street. If we shift from the limited European knowledge colonially construed on Arab culture and history to the much more expansive presence of Persia in the European imaginary from Classical Antiquity to the Hebrew Bible, we see the global correlation of capital and culture become organic to a different politics and economics of knowledge production. If at the same time we consider Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement as the prose of our historicality, then the poetic disposition of the prospect of decoloniality opens up onto a whole different politics of knowledge production.  

In this vein we might consider the global reception of two seminal filmmakers, Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov, as cases in point, where the poetics of estrangement has had a profound catalytic impact on the aesthetics and therefore the epistemics of knowing and being. The intuition of transcendence at the heart of these filmmakers’ oeuvres transforms the open-ended visual poetics of their untranslatablity into a potent aesthetics of liberation conducive to a whole different species of the knowing subject. Thinking of the condition of decoloniality beyond Said’s critique of colonial binaries leads to the interstitial space between poetics and politics that transcends them both and is reducible to neither.