Orientalism within Europe: Introduction

0010.1177/0047244116664644Journal of European Studies research-article2016 Orientalism within Europe: Introduction Journal of European Studies 1–7 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0047244116664644 jes.sagepub.com Elisa Segnini University of British Columbia Abstract This special issue discusses texts and cultural artefacts that defy the idea of Europe as a homogeneous and coherent construct, with a focus on north/south, East/West divisions. Starting from a series of case studies, the contributions address differences and divisions and attempt to answer questions such as: Where does Europe begin and who establishes these boundaries? Who is considered European and who is not? How is difference described, represented and imagined in zones that are positioned within Europe, often at its core? What metaphors or narrative strategies are used to describe the other within Europe? Do writers from minority cultures participate in orientalized representations of their own culture? If orientalism can be conceptualized as the opposite of civilization, is it necessarily connected to notions of backwardness? If so, how does this play out in a European context? The range of the case studies considered in this issue is broad: chronologically, the essays span the nineteenth century to the present, and geographically they go from Russia to France, from Croatia and Hungary to Catalonia and the Basque countries. Overall, the essays take a transnational approach that considers ethnic, cultural and linguistic differences and notions of belonging within and beyond political units. A common ground is provided by recurrent critical concepts that offer a useful theoretical framework for discussion, such as Roberto Dainotto’s argument that Europe constructs itself not only in opposition to the non-Western, but also to its internal other, and Milica Bakić-Hayden’s notion of ‘nesting orientalism’: that is, the idea that countries who have been orientalized can also appropriate this discourse. Keywords borders, Europe, immigration, minorities, orientalism This special issue originates in a panel held at the 2015 American Comparative Literature Association annual convention in Seattle, which was dedicated to literature and its audiences. Our panel brought together experienced scholars, emerging researchers and Corresponding author: Elisa Segnini, University of British Columbia, 6354 Crescent Road, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z2. Email: elisa.segnini@ubc.ca 2 Journal of European Studies graduate students whose work focuses on European studies and who are based in the US, Canada, Italy and Turkey. The fact that none of the contributors was working in their country of origin, and that many of us had changed or developed our research focus differently after moving to a new setting, necessarily informed our discussion. During the three-day conference, we became aware of not only points of juncture and connection in our research, but also methodological and conceptual differences across area studies as well as different academic settings. We discussed the resistance to comparative approaches in the North American academy, and the different conditions of scholarship in Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts. Our aim was to draw attention to texts and cultural artefacts that defied the idea of Europe as a homogeneous and coherent construct and to focus on north/south, east/west divisions. For those of us based in North America, this was not only a theoretical interest, but an issue we faced every day teaching and researching in an environment in which Europe is often perceived as a uniform space, an entity held together by the idea of superiority in comparison with non-European peoples and cultures – as Edward Said argued in his seminal work Orientalism, originally published in 1978. While revisionists of Said have pointed out the limitations of this approach, much postcolonial scholarship continues to focus mainly on England and France, effectively reducing the European linguistic and cultural landscape to a few hegemonic languages. And while critics of Eurocentrism have done much to de-centre Europe and challenge European paradigms, these developments, combined with the strong focus on area studies in the North American academy, have effectively overshadowed the differences and divisions that exist within Europe. If, however, we look beyond academic structures, these differences became hard to ignore: consider the discussion surrounding Greece’s bailout, the independence movements in Scotland and Catalonia, the different responses of northern and southern European countries to the migration crisis, and the UK’s recent decision to leave the European Union, motivated mainly by resistance to foreign workers coming from the EU. Starting from a series of case studies, the contributions to this issue address differences and divisions and attempt to answer questions such as: Where does Europe begin and who establishes these boundaries? Who is considered European and who is not? How is difference described, represented and imagined in zones that are positioned within Europe, often at its core? What metaphors or narrative strategies are used to describe the other within Europe? Do writers from minority cultures participate in orientalized representations of their own culture? If orientalism can be conceptualized as the opposite of civilization, is it necessarily connected to notions of backwardness? If so, how does this play out in a European context? As the essays gathered in the issue illustrate, these questions have different answers depending on the time when the texts were produced and on the audiences that their authors were addressing. The range of the case studies considered in this issue is broad: chronologically, the essays span the nineteenth century to the present, and geographically they go from Russia to France, from Croatia and Hungary to Catalonia and the Basque Country. This variety necessarily entails a multiplicity of concerns: for example, Ekaterina Alexandrovna’s essay explores the construction of identities at a critical time in the construction of the nation-state, whereas Colleen Hays and Annedith Schneider situate their discussion of cultural stereotypes and hybrid identities at a time when nations are being transformed by increasingly labile Segnini 3 linguistic and cultural boundaries. Overall, the essays take a transnational approach that considers ethnic, cultural and linguistic differences and notions of belonging within and beyond political units. A common ground is provided by recurrent critical concepts that offer a useful theoretical framework for discussion. References to Said’s Orientalism, as a stereotyped way of imagining and describing the non-Western, emerge in almost all contributions, but are applied to marginal geographies in Europe. In this respect, a useful notion that recurs throughout the essays is Roberto Dainotto’s argument that Europe constructs itself not only in opposition to the non-Western, but also to its internal other, and that exotic difference can be ‘translated and replaced by one contained within Europe itself’ (2007: 54). As a development of Said’s orientalism, this concept provides a useful framework for considering processes of othering taking place within Europe, rather than as applied to a reality beyond it. Another key notion is that of ‘nesting orientalism’ developed by Milica Bakić-Hayden: that is, the idea that countries who have been orientalized can also appropriate this discourse (1995: 922). Many of the essays extend this concept geographically and explore geographies deemed marginal within the nation-state, as well as the contrast between rural communities and cosmopolitan areas in the same country. Notwithstanding the diversity of the corpus, striking similarities appear in the representation of regions such as Algarve in Portugal, the imaginary island of Trečić in Croatia, the Basque village of Obaba and the Catalan Mequinensa. These regions are not only described as marginal, rural and ‘backward’, but also as frozen in time, representing Europe’s past in contrast to the modern, progressive image provided by the capital. At the same time, it is in these regions that the authors identify manifestations of counter-hegemonic thought that provide alternatives to the mission civilisatrice that informs official ideologies of more and less dominant nations. The first section ‘Constructing national identities’, examines crucial moments of transition for the nation-state, when the notion of progress becomes one with the notion of modernization. Ekaterina Alexandrovna’s ‘Founding the father: Constructing a paternal identity in Alexsandr Pushkin’s The Blackmoor of Peter the Great and Alexandre Dumas’ ‘Blanche de Beaulieu’ opens the discussion by reflecting on ethnic and racial difference in nineteenth-century Russian and French literary texts, and their subversive role in challenging nineteenth-century conceptions of history, culture and race. Through a comparative analysis of Pushkin’s unfinished novel (1827) and Dumas’ short story (1826–31), the article underlines the similar narrative strategies used by the two writers in reconstructing the life of their forefathers. In addition, it draws attention to the way in which both Pushkin and Dumas betray a divided stance on their African descent. The comparison sheds light on how, even though nineteenth-century Russia is often seen as a marginal European power – without overseas colonies or involvement in the slave trade – it shared the same conceptual framework as other imperialist nations. Pushkin’s and Dumas’s texts, as Alexandrovna argues, find a way to echo contemporary ideology, deploying the same racist imagery popularized in nineteenth-century scientific discourse, but destabilize them by emphasizing the modern and Western features of their African ancestors and attributing to other characters the stereotyped features ascribed to negroes. On the one hand, by reconstructing important moments in the history of their forefathers, the writers ‘restore blackness to its place’; on the other, they do so by emphasizing their ancestors’ contributions to foundational moments of the nation and lay claim to their position as 4 Journal of European Studies national heroes. In doing so, they also validate their own position as ‘national’ writers and their place in the local canon. In ‘Medievalism and Portuguese modernity in Lídia Jorge’s O dia dos prodígios’ (1980), Sara Ceroni explores Jorge’s use of medievalism in the depiction of a rural community in the southern region of Algarve between the end of Salazar’s regime and the Carnation Revolution in the early 1970s, when Portugal was transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. Drawing on Enrique Dussel’s definition of modernity and on Roberto Dainotto’s reworking of Said’s theory of orientalism, Ceroni reflects on Portugal’s ambivalent stance as a nation with the heritage of an imperial power but a marginal status in twentieth-century European geography. Medievalism, Ceroni notes, stands in close relation with orientalism, as it allows the exploration of a temporally rather than geographically remote other, described in terms of binary opposition to the present. In this light, medievalism, in Jorge’s novel, functions as a locus that challenges both a linear conception of history, according to which the medieval is considered as the origin of modernity, and the hegemonic narratives of modernization promoted by the Portuguese government in the 1970s. The rural region of Algarve is depicted as a place where the Middle Ages still exist, despite Salazar’s promotion of the country as enlightened and progressive. In fact, Jorge’s O dia dos prodígios describes Algarve as a remote rural place in relation to the country’s urban areas and to the capital, Lisbon. Thus the process of othering concerns not only the ‘delay’ of the European South in relation to Europe’s modern, northern states, but also its own south in relation to the country’s urban centres. The second section, ‘Margins, borders, boundaries’, explores notions of identity and belonging beyond the geographical and political boundaries of the nation-state. In ‘Beyond and behind the Iron Curtain: Sándor Márai crossing the borders between 1946 and 1948’, Judit Papp investigates the autobiographical writings of the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai (1900–89), who narrates his travels to Switzerland, France and Italy, and his subsequent return to Hungary in a Europe divided by the Iron Curtain. Papp draws attention to how, throughout his diaries and travel writing, Márai is constantly concerned with describing the cultural boundaries between East and West. While the West continues to be defined in binary opposition to the East, a close reading of these texts also indicates that these conceptions, as well as Hungary’s status as an ‘Eastern’ or ‘Western’ country, changed radically in the years after the Second World War. The diaries and the novel in fact witness not only Márai’s disappointment with Western values after the Holocaust, but also the ever-shifting boundaries of the ‘the West’ as an ideological and geographical construct. As Papp underlines, it is not possible to read Márai’s work according to a single edition, as the author kept re-writing, censoring and complementing his own texts in the light of potential audiences. Therefore, the Hungarian editions differ substantially from one another as well as from the editions published in other European languages, in which Márai is more concerned with avoiding negative attributes associated with Hungarian culture. A comparative reading, Papp argues, is thus necessary to understand the writer’s vision, and this reading should be guided by the diaries, as they indicate which manuscripts were not suitable for foreign audiences, and which ones are intended ‘for Hungarians only’. A thread throughout Márai’s writing is his desire to reach a wide readership, which is contradicted by his nostalgia for the Hungarian language and Segnini 5 his longing to feel at home among its speakers, a longing which eventually led him to return to his native country at the cost of foregoing writing. In ‘Croatia’s self-colonization: Intra-national nesting orientalisms in Osmi povjerenik’, Nika Šetek examines the case of Croatia, a country that is often seen as being the junction between Western and Eastern Europe. Through an analysis of newspaper articles published in the last two decades, Šetek addresses Croatia’s liminal status, its denial of being part of the Balkans and its identification with the West. Drawing on Milica Bakić-Hayden’s concept of nesting orientalisms, a phenomenon that, according to BakićHayden, takes place when ‘the designation of “other” has been appropriated and manipulated by those who have themselves been designated as such in orientalist discourse’ (1995: 922), Šetek develops the notion of intra-national nesting orientalisms, which she defines as the ‘never-ending, and often amusing, deferral of the Balkans to an other space, not only within the region, but within one and the same Balkan country’. This notion guides her reading of Renato Baretić’s novel Osmi povjerenik (‘The eighth commissioner’). As the novel was published in 2003, at the time when Croatia was seeking to join the European Union, Šetek suggests that it can be read as addressing Croatia’s anxieties concerning a loss of cultural specificity and tradition. In narrating the adventures of a commissioner sent from the capital to set up a local government in the most remote of the Croatian islands, the fictional Trečić, the novel mocks Croatia’s complexes towards more powerful nations and describes a process of colonization in a country that never had colonies and that was, on the contrary, often invaded by imperialist nations. Šetek’s reading highlights how Trečić is described as a savage, ‘backward’, irrational place where time seems to have stopped, and argues that, with its own peculiar traditions and language and ethnic hate, it fulfils all the stereotypes ascribed to the Balkans. The island thus constitutes an entity against which Croatia can establish its cultural superiority, shifting its ‘Balkan-ness’ away from itself. As Šetek concludes, by deploying colonial and postcolonial tropes, but placing them in a European context, Baretić’s novel reflects Croatia’s anxieties and relationship to other Western European nations and its ‘never-ending search for an Other, a place to take on the burden of the negative stereotype it is trying to avoid’. Matylda Figlerowicz also addresses the narrative strategies through which nations perceived as ‘marginal’ or ‘exotic’ within Europe project this difference into their own regions, deploying similar tropes of orientalism at an intra-national level. In ‘Margin and freedom: The space of world literature seen from the Basque Country and Catalonia’, she examines the ‘exotic’ and ‘different’ image of Spain constructed in Europe and promoted during Franco’s regime. Elaborating on Barbara Johnson’s observation that ‘the differences between entities … are shown to be based on a repression of differences within entities, ways in which an entity differs from itself’ (1992: x–xi), she reflects on the marginal status to which Franco’s regime relegated non-hegemonic cultures within Spain. Using two cases studies from the 1980s, Obabakoak (1988) by Bernardo Atxaga and Històries de la mà esquerra (‘Stories of the Left Hand’, 1981) by Jesús Moncada, she investigates how the space of world literature can look from the perspective of Catalonia and the Basque country. Through a close reading of Atxaga’s and Moncada’s works, she notes that both authors address the discrimination against Basque and Catalan during Franco’s regime, questioning the status of these languages as ‘not deemed for literary 6 Journal of European Studies production’. She then points out that both collections of stories portray the Basque village of Obaba and the Catalan location Mequinensa as rural and marginal communities, characterized by an irrational approach to life. In both cases, however, the villages are far from being hermetically sealed from the outside world. Atxaga and Moncada create characters that can speak for the Basque and Catalan traditions only after having travelled and learned about other cultures, gathering experiences that allow them to look at their own cultures from the perspective of outsiders. These narratives, Figlerowicz argues, thus offer examples of how knowledge of one’s own culture is reached only through explorations of other cultures and through the awareness of one’s position. Engaging with the models of world literature proposed by Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Édouard Glissant and Martha Nussbaum, she arrives at a model based on the idea of the margin, and at the notion that ‘identifying with a culture or a literature and claiming it as one’s own inherently implies recognizing the difference that deems it marginal’. The last section of this special issue, ‘Hybrid identities and cultural and ethnic stereotypes’, is dedicated to the representation of cultural and ethnic stereotypes in addressing issues of integration. Both articles focus on France, and reflect on how, although French law makes no distinction between citizens based on their origins, the children of immigrants continue to be perceived in terms of difference and to be portrayed accordingly. ‘Beur–French romances in French comedies: Postcolonial mimicry or a challenge to essentialist identities?’ by Colleen Hayes explores how popular culture can help us understand tensions about multiculturalism in the French national imagery. As Hays notes, the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 have stirred new debates about the integration of the population of North African origin in France and about the country’s social and ethnic divisions. By using humour to address cultural differences arising from culinary traditions and family misunderstanding, French mixed-couple romantic comedies provide a space in which issues of integration can be safely discussed in a light tone. Through a close reading of two recent French productions that revolve around relationships between Franco-Maghrebi couples – Il reste du jambon (Anne DePetrini, 2010) and Mohamed Dubois (Ernesto Ona, 2013) – Hays demonstrates that both films seem to suggest ways to resolve conflicts and mitigate tensions, challenging stereotypes and proposing alternative models, but that they ultimately encourage essentialist representations, restating prejudices and fears present in the French national imagery and underlining the marginal status of Franco-Maghrebis in French society. Taking French literature as a case study for a reflection on European literature, Annedith Schneider, in ‘Literature of immigration as a literature of Europe’, discusses the role that the literature of immigration plays within the national space. Engaging with Pascale Casanova’s view of European literature as a space of struggle among nations (2009: 126), she contends that the notion of ‘European literature’ is itself a political project, and that within the European book industry, ‘the treatment of immigrant literature reflects long-standing anxieties … that not everyone who lives in Europe actually belongs in Europe’. Thus the production of authors born to immigrant parents in France is marketed differently according to the origin of the writers: books by authors with Western origins have a better chance of being accepted as French literature, whereas writing by authors of non-Western origins is usually characterized as ‘Francophone’. Schneider further raises the issue of whether the writer’s intention contributes to the way Segnini 7 s/he is perceived by the national audience, and how much it is instead determined by the author’s ethnicity and the politics of the editorial market. The French author Sema Kılıçkaya, born and raised in France in a family of Turkish immigrants, provides an example for considering these issues. Although not all of Kılıçkaya’s novels are set in France, Schneider argues that they should nevertheless be considered French literature. She then examines Kılıçkaya’s third novel, Quatre-vingt-dix-sept (2015), the first book by Kılıçkaya to be set in Turkey. Through a close reading of this text, she demonstrates that the novel’s concerns, such as the present status of ethnic and linguistic minorities in Turkey, or the divisions between East and West and between rural and cosmopolitan areas, can be read as directly related to life in France, more precisely to issues of multiculturalism and integration. Thus Kılıçkaya’s ‘discussion of diversity and conflict in Turkey is also a discussion of diversity and conflict in France’. As Schneider notes, Pascale Casanova rejects a notion of European literature as a ‘juxtaposition of already constituted national literatures’ (2009: 126), and argues instead that it should be seen in terms of ‘rivalries, struggles and power relations between national literatures’. The contributions in this issue indicate that, besides national competitions, there are always additional struggles that play out at intra-national and transnational levels, whether it is the case of minor literatures, literature of immigration or simply of authors who do not entirely belong to the national canon. All of these phenomena point to the complexity of Europe and to its inner divisions. References Casanova P. (2009) European literature: simply a higher degree of universality? European Review 17: 121–32. Bakić-Hayden M (1995) Nesting orientalisms: the case of former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review 54(4): 917–31. Dainotto RM (2007) Europe (in Theory). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Johnson B (1992) The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Said EW (1994) Orientalism, 2nd edn. New York: Vintage Books. Author biography Elisa Segnini is an adjunct Professor at the Centre for World Literature at Simon Fraser University and a Research Associate at the University of British Columbia. Her research relates to the fields of comparative literature, translation and Italian studies. She has published on transnational modernism, re-writings and adaptations, theatre translation in the 1920s and 1930s, and the contemporary Italian novel. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Forum Italicum, The Italianist, The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Connotations, and The Pirandello Society of America.