Intercultural Masquerades: New Orientalism, New Occidentalism, Old Exoticism

Encounters between East and West Intercultural Perspectives

Series editors Fred Dervin, Helsinki, Finland Regis Machart, Serdang, Malaysia

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13823

Regis Machart · Fred Dervin · Minghui Gao Editors

Intercultural Masquerade New Orientalism, New Occidentalism, Old Exoticism

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Editors Regis Machart Modern Languages and Communication Universiti Putra Malaysia Serdang Malaysia

Minghui Gao Department of Teacher Education University of Helsinki Helsinki Finland

Fred Dervin Department of Teacher Education University of Helsinki Helsinki Finland

ISSN  2364-6721 ISSN  2364-673X  (electronic) Encounters between East and West ISBN 978-3-662-47055-8 ISBN 978-3-662-47056-5  (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-47056-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953779 Springer Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, Higher Education Press 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publishers, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publishers, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publishers nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

Contents

1 Reconceptualising the ‘Other’ in Australian Universities. . . . . . . . . . . 1 Xianlin Song and Greg McCarthy 2 Encountering ‘the West’ Through Academic Mobility: Shifting Representations and Reinforced Stereotypes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Jane Jackson 3 The PRC “Foreign Talent” Scholars and Their Singaporean “Other”: Neo-Occidentalism Amidst Intercultural Contact in the Context of Higher Education Student Mobility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Peidong Yang 4 French Media Critics of Asian Education: A Systematic Quest for the Cultural Other. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 E.-Lynn Yeow 5 Crate-Digging Columbuses and Vinyl Vespuccis—Exoticism in World Music Vinyl Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Lari Aaltonen 6 East Blurs West: Global Crusaders in Amin Maalouf’s L’Amour de Loin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Patricia Frederick 7 Using Diaspora: Orientalism, Japanese Nationalism, and the Japanese Brazilian Diaspora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Yuko Kawai 8 The Rise of the Chinese Villain: Demonic Representation of the Asian Character in Popular Literature (1880–1950). . . . . . . . . . 119 Marion Decome 9 Writing Ambivalence: Visions of the West in Republican and Post-Maoist Chinese Literature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Emilie Guillerez v

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Regis Machart Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer at Universiti Putra Malaysia. His ­research interests include academic mobilities and construction of identities. Fred Dervin  is Professor of multicultural education at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Dervin holds several professorships around the world. He specialises in intercultural pedagogy, the sociology of multiculturalism, student and academic mobility. http://blogs.helsinki.fi/dervin/. Minghui Gao  is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Helsinki (Finland).

Contributors Lari Aaltonen  is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tampere, Finland. His doctoral thesis explores the concepts of exoticism, othering and representations of ethnicity in world music. Yuko Marion Decome Ph.D.  2014, Cultural Studies, University of Montpellier, France is an Associate Researcher at IRIEC. She currently serves as a cultural mediator in Memorial Site of Les Milles Camp, France. Patricia Frederick is Professor of French and Chair of Global Languages at Northern Arizona University. She has published critical studies treating contemporary Francophone literature as well as mediaeval folklore and culture. Jane Jackson  is a Professor in the English Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her teaching and research center on education abroad, language, identity and intercultural communication.

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Emilie Guillerez  holds a Ph.D. in Chinese Studies from the University of Montpellier (France). Her research focuses on gender, identity and womanhood in modern and contemporary Chinese Women’s literature. Yuko Kawai Ph.D.  is an Associate Professor of communication in the Department of Intercultural Communication, Rikkyo University, Japan. Her research focus is multiculturalism and racism in Japan. Greg Mccarthy  is a political science Professor and the incoming BHP Billiton Chair of Australian Studies at Peking University. He has done extensive research on Australian politics and critical theory. Xianlin Song  is now an Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on global higher education, transcultural theory and feminist studies in contemporary China. Peidong Yang  (DPhil, Oxford) is Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include international student mobility and Internet/media culture, with a focus on China. E-Lynn Yeow  holds an MA (Discourse Studies) from Universiti Putra Malaysia. She is interested in social representations, construction of identity and media ­discourses.

Introduction

Dis-Orient to Re-Orient Ourselves? Moving Eastwards The mythification and subsequent attraction for the ‘East’ has a long tradition in the ‘West’. According to Griffiths (2013) “the radically different Oriental ‘Other’ has always been a function of ‘Western’ countries needs to define themselves in their autonomous and individuated terms” (p. 5). Already in the first century of our common era, the Greek philosopher and essayist Plutarch (1579/1964) related the passionate relation between the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar and the Queen of Egypt Cleopatra in The Life of Julius Cesar. Over two millennia, the ‘mesmerising beauty’ of the Oriental monarch, who was actually of Macedonian origin, generated a rich literature and iconography, a passion for which the 1963 movie Cleopatra staging Elisabeth Taylor, or the bust of the queen exposed in the Altes Museum in Berlin (Germany) claimed by the Egyptian government are mere epiphenomena. Cleopatra’s affair with Julius Caesar was followed by her tragic liaison with Antony, which was similarly romanticised and brought to the stage by the British poet and playwright Shakespeare (1607). If referring to a certain form of Orientalism in the case of Plutarch may sound anachronistic to some of us, there is no doubt about this passion for the Other in Shakespeare’s words, which render a sensual environment in which idealised, voluptuous creatures similar to Greek deities evolve: Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides, So many mermaids, tended her i’ the eyes, And made their bends adornings; at the helm A seeming mermaid steers; the silken tackle Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands, That yarely frame the office. From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast Her people out upon her, and Antony, ix

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x Enthroned i’ the market-place, did sit alone, Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too And made a gap in nature. (Shakespeare 1607, 2.2.215)

The Orientalist passion for the Middle East (Proche et Moyen Orient in French) never completely disappeared and even in the beginning of the twenty-first century it is still very vivid. For example, Sarah Brighman’s (2003) music album Harem definitely contributes to the perpetuation of a mystified (Middle-)East: the cover of the record makes ample use of arabesques and exotic references (palm trees, sandy scenery, etc.), and the video clip of the main track of the same name re-creates a sensual environment in which highly sexualised females are dancing on a frenetic rhythm to seduce hyper-masculinised ‘masters of the place’. In the same vein, the popular novels of the series Le Juge d’Égypte (The Egyptian Judge) by the French Egyptologist-cum-novelist Jacq (1993a, b, 1994) surfs on this representation of a sexualised Orient, even if the story takes place in pharaonic times. However, with time, the importance of this classical Orient from across the Mediterranean Sea receded to make room for more remote destinations. In his travelogue Les voyages de Marco Polo (The book of the marvels of the world), the Venetian merchant Marco Polo (1350) describes his journey along the Silk Road until Mongolia and China. His story accounts for the first descriptions of a Far East which were to be inscribed in the European imaginary about Asia and are until nowadays part of it. The recent screening and reception of the American drama series Marco Polo in 2014 shows that the Venetian’s legacy is still marketable: it was aired in Germany, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, USA, Australia and New Zealand, i.e. countries traditionally located in the ‘West’. Marco Polo has become a mythic character symbolising the encounter between European powers (Venice) and the Empire of the Khan of the Khans (Mongolia) and his narratives are still contributing to this vivid ‘memory’ of Asia. In relation to colonial expansion, writers found a particular interest in the newly ‘discovered’ territories and populations. Situating the action of their novels in exotic places, they described an Other who fascinated them and whom they wanted to know better, but also sometimes bearing in mind that this process of Othering was indeed implying a form of introspection, a reflexion by ‘Westerners’ on who they ‘really were’, and on their own identity (Lüsenbrick 1996). This representation of the East was once again very much sexualised in a desire to subvert local populations who were des-humanised, objectified and alienated. By assigning ‘feminine’ attributes to males from the conquered territories or by insisting on the feminine aspects of their women (sensuality, sexuality, etc.), colonial powers were replicating (gender) power relations to impose their (‘masculine’) authority on local populations (Stoler 1995). This association quest of identity/feminisation of local populations can be clearly noticed for example in the award-winning French novel Malaisie (Fauconnier 1930) which takes place in colonial Malaysia where most female characters are represented as sexual objects.

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Beyond Orientophilia and Westophobia The Western passion for the ‘East’ crossed all boundaries: it was noticeable in literature (Shakespeare, Fauconnier), architecture (the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, UK), design (rococo Chinoiserie), international relations (Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition) and business (Marco Polo, the Great Navigators). Following Hübinette (n.d.), Orientalism is associated with the academia, in particular the study of languages and cultures of the Orient and Asia (p. 1) which gained momentum in the eighteenth century. Orientalism grew in importance during the peak of colonial times when contacts with ‘cultural Others’ became more frequent, it has a longer history and is related to canonical studies of Hebraic texts during the Renaissance, so Orientophilia i.e. the love or at least attraction for the Orient, has been in existence for even longer time. Orientophilia and Orientalism go beyond academic studies and they appear more deep-rooted in Western societies. Critics of these imaginaries and their connotations appeared well before postcolonial theorists addressed the question. In Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters), the French philosopher Montesquieu (1721/2013) already referred strategically in his title to an exotic Orient to attract readers, but in his case, it was to better ridicule the exoticising of impersonated Persian characters. In one of the letters, a Persian changes his attire to see how French people would react to his ‘being different’. Once dressed like ‘French people do’, he became unworthy of any interest and witnessed a comment mixing curiosity and what we would now label as racism: “Oh I ah! A Persian, is he? Most amazing! However can anybody be a Persian?” (Montesquieu 1721/2013, p. 78) But the main systematic critic came from Edward Said (1978/2000) whose theorisation of Orientalism has been widely used, amongst others, in postcolonial studies, with divergent outcomes. Said first acknowledged the above-mentioned acceptation of the term Orientalism, i.e. the scholarly studies of Asian languages and culture (p. 68–69), but more importantly, he insisted on the “ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (p. 69) which bears a complete set of discriminations in disfavour of the East. Said has been very prolific and his ideas have been called upon to justify almost anything under the label postcolonial studies. For example, based on Said’s recognition of discriminations between the East and the West, certain scholars fell into the exact opposite trap and started to systematically blame ‘the West’ to re-empower ‘the East’. By doing so, they were similarly essentialising and stereotyping populations and giving very little voice to individuals. They were indeed perpetuating widespread clichés, associating for example Oriental people with more philosophical (or religious) values/interests than Westerners, or depicting them as more hardworking and dedicated. In a recent discussion with an American educator, one of us questioned her use of the word ‘Asian’ (read also Eastern) in her argument that “people from Asia are conscientious and hard-working”. When we asked her what she meant by ‘Asian’ and who she was referring to, she then explained that the ‘Asians’ she had met were from Taiwan. So, suddenly, the

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geopolitical scale of such an assertion is downsized from a whole continent to an island. We agree with Breidenbach and Nyíri (2009) that: Needless to say, the concept of Asia itself is a Western-invented category that means different things at different times (even today, ‘Asian’ means one thing in London and another in New York), and any common sense of ‘Asianness’—unclear though its reach may be—is a recent product of satellite television, karaoke, economic growth and ‘Pacific Century’ hype. (p. 51)

In contrast, ‘the West’ was depicted as more incline to leisure activities and subjected to individualistic values. Neither ‘the East’ nor ‘the West’ are, however, homogenous and for this reason, Occidentalism (Carrier 1995)—and the Westophobia that emerges out of it—does not counterbalance colonial discourses but perpetuates and reinforces an imbalance between two entities, which is detrimental to both of them. It is also important to note that new forms of Orientalism and Occidentalism— new ideological fictions—are emerging, which share similarities with past forms. Interestingly these two elements often replace, today, ‘flawed’ objects such as the nation–state and the methodological nationalism that goes with it. More than ever today, the East has also used the West to “define themselves in their autonomous and individuated terms” (Griffiths 2013, p. 5). In early 2015, the Chinese Education Minister Yuan Guiren urged Chinese universities to exert tighter control over textbooks that “spread Western values”. In a similar vein Kureishi (2005) describes this Westophobia—or fear of contamination from the West—as follows: Among Muslims, there has been a reverse Orientalism, or ‘Occidentalism’, at work. Many of the fundamentalists I met, indeed many Muslims, were keen to see the West as corrupt an over-sexualised; ‘there was too much freedom’. The West could seem chaotic, overindividualistic; the family was less important, or constantly mutating. (p. 10)

Yet what hides between the labels East and West is often unclear. Occidentalism often means the USA and symbolically important nations in Europe or, maybe, the European Union. As to the East, it is often either simply China and Muslim worlds or an imagined amalgamation of countries situated in the ‘East’. Confucianism or Buddhism is also confused with the East. The re-emergence of a new kind of Silk Road, politically engineered by China, currently contributes to reposition Orientalism. Countries like Turkey, or even Russia, are sort of stuck in between—and play with this fuzzy identity in their nation branding. Power imbalance, inequality and political variation within these two fictional spheres are rarely problematised. Some postcolonial scholars (i.e. Cuadrado-Fernandez 2015) have adopted a deconstructivist approach in order to avoid falling into the trap of cultural essentialism and to offer critics of these new forms of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Their approach is coherent with the one of researchers from other fields (cultural anthropology, sociology, intercultural communication, etc.) for whom identity is not a given or a static feature, but co-constructed during interactions, depending on the time and space where the interaction takes place, the interlocutors and their past, mood, feelings, etc. (see Dervin 2012, 2013; Holliday 2010; Machart and

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Lim 2013). Similarly, postcolonial novelists like Duras (1984) adopt a more fluid approach to identification and refrain from depicting individuals as cultural archetypes (Machart 2013) and some educationists (Abdallah-Pretceille 2005) beg for a des-objectification of individuals, a ‘revoicing’ of their (inter-)subjectivities. They all tend to agree with Adib-Moghaddam (2011) who argued that the East and the West are not “tectonic plates that move against each other” (p. 19). This corresponds to moving beyond what we refer to as ‘intercultural masquerades’ in this book.

About this Volume In their chapters the authors discuss ways of re-orienting and dis-orienting various objects of research. They are guided by an argument put forward by A. Holliday (2010/11): These terms (East and West) have a problematically unclear nature, hovering between geography and psychological concept, to the extent that it is impossible to use them in a logical, consistent manner, while at the same time using them is unavoidable because they are on everyone’s lips. (p. 11)

Our goal is thus not to suggest getting rid of the dichotomy East and West. First of all, it would be impossible as it is strongly established in our globalised worlds. Second of all, removing them would mean creating new descriptive terms which would not solve the problems we face. Therefore the authors treat the dichotomy as a construction, and instead of attempting to define what it represents, they examine how it relates to the political, identity and power. The intercultural masquerades of the book title correspond to these aspects. The authors also consider important to be critical towards Westophobia. They thus agree with Holliday (2010) that We need to be careful not too easily to interpret all Western depictions of a non-Western Other [or vice versa] as being chauvinistic and not to indulge in the overextending of accusations which give political correctness its bad name. (p. 85)

In other words, what we propose to do is to re-orient to dis-orient ourselves ad infinitum by adding to the critical canon. The book is composed of nine chapters which were written by scholars from different parts of the world. The first four chapters focus on education, mobility and migration from the ‘East’ to the ‘West’. In the first chapter, Xianlin Song and Greg McCarthy propose to reconceptualise the ‘Other’ (the ‘Chinese learner’) in Australian universities by denouncing a variety of ‘anachronistic’ views and practices. Starting from Said’s Orientalism and Chakrabarty’s general theory of developmentalism the authors argue that differences in cultural background do not assume out of time with contemporary norms. In Encountering ‘the West’ Through Academic Mobility: Shifting Representations and Reinforced Stereotypes Jane Jackson draws on a largescale study of international exchange students from Hong Kong to describe the

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perceptions and experiences of a mainland Chinese participant who studied in the United States. This particular student returned home with reinforced stereotypes of ‘Westerners’. The author thus problematizes the needs and benefits of intercultural training before study abroad. The third chapter was written by Peidong Yang and deals with a group of mainland Chinese undergraduate students funded to study in Singapore under the “foreign talent” scholarship program. The author shows how these “PRC scholars” develop neo-Western imaginations about local Singaporeans—thus shifting the representational boundary between the East and West. In French Media Critics of Asian Education: A Systematic Quest for the Cultural Other E-Lynn Yeow examines how the French media construct Asian students and their academic success. Although the students are praised for their ‘performance’ the kind of education that they have received is criticised for being authoritarian and repressive. The next chapters focus on ‘intercultural masquerades’ in the arts (music, fiction, opera, TV drama). Lari Aaltonen explores exoticism in world music in his chapter. Examining “forgotten” and “obscure” compilations from Ethiopia, Turkey, Ghana, amongst others on vinyl the author is interested in how the ‘Other’ is depicted in the compilation liner notes. His study shows that they contain neo-colonialist narratives about different cultures, hidden behind a narrative of ‘great exploration’. In the next chapter, Patricia Frederick concentrates on how the East blurs the West in Amin Maalouf’s L’Amour de loin, a libretto he wrote for the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. The opera is about the encounters between a French poet-crusader dreaming of a woman from the East, the Countess of Tripoli, in the Middle Ages. Both characters embody both fusion of cultural identities and global crusaders bridging and blurring the boundaries between East and West. Through his libretto Maalouf discusses themes relevant to our times: displacement, exoticism and the perceptions of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Yuko Kawai, the author of the seventh chapter, examines the way the Japanese Brazilian Diaspora relates to nationalism and Orientalism. Based on a TV drama series about Japanese migration to Brazil Kawai shows how the Diaspora is discursively used in an Orientalist manner. In The Rise of the Chinese Villain: Demonic Representation of the Asian Character in Popular Literature (1880–1950), Marion Decome reviews how the ‘Chinaman’ as a villain has been represented by ‘Western’ authors who had never been to China. The end of the Nineteenth Century marked the imagined threat of the ‘Yellow Peril’ which led to fabricate cruel and frightening Asian characters. In the last chapter, Emilie Guillerez takes a different stance by writing about visions of the West in Republican and post-Maoist Chinese literature. Concentrating on how Chinese men are depicted by women writers in this literature the author shows that post-Maoism marked the depreciation of Chinese men, especially in terms of virility, in comparison to Western men.

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We hope that this volume will excite and inspire researchers to provide new answers to the fascinating and important question of encounters between East and West. We also hope that it will encourage further problematising of current research effort in the fields of intercultural encounters beyond the problematic ‘masquerades’ that we have witnessed over the past few decades.

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Plutarch (1579/1964). The life of Julius Caesar (Transl. Thomas North). In G. Bullough (Ed.), Narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare, V: The Roman plays: Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus (pp. 58–135). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Polo, M. (1350). Les voyages de Marco Polo. Retrieved June 12, 2015 from http://www.wdl.org/ en/item/14300/ Said, E. (1978/2000). Orientalism. In M. Bayoumi, & A. Rubin (Eds.), The Edward Said reader (pp. 67–92). New York, NY: Vintage Books. Shakespeare, W. (1607). Antony and Cleopatra. Retrieved June 12, 2015 from http:// shakespeare.mit.edu/cleopatra/full.html Stoler, A. L. (1995). Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Regis Machart Fred Dervin