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Footnotes
1The coinages belong to: George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (1993), Benjamin Barber, Jihad versus McWorld (1995), Time magazine (1961), Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (2004). The American variant of the suffix -ization has been preserved in the text on purpose.
2Allegedly, the domination is manifest politically and military through the North Atlantic Treaty, economically through the World Bank and the IMF, and culturally through Hollywood, the pervasiveness of American English, pop culture, and the media.
3A few examples of traumatic representations of 9/11: American
Widow (Alissa Torres 2008), Everyman (Philip Roth 2006), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer 2005), The Good Life (Jay McInerney 2006), The Things They Left Behind (Stephen King 2003, short story), and, of course, Falling Man (Don DeLillo 2007).
4‘The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world […] inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-reviling, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment’ (Freud 1917, 244, digitised).
5 New York Daily News documents the existence of this small universe in an article published in 2013: ‘There’s a Little Dhaka in East New York. A tiny portion of the Queens-Brooklyn neighborhood called City Line—long an African-American neighborhood—is booming with Bangladeshi immigration, filling vacant shops with South Asian markets and, on Fridays, streets with Muslims bowed in prayer. The population of Bangladeshis remains small, but it has tripled in the last 10 years. And Census figures show that 83% of the new residents of the five-block area surrounding Baitul Mamur Musjid and Community Center on Glenmore Ave. near Conduit Ave. are from Bangladesh’ (Mayara Guimaraes, 15 September 2013).
6‘Le premier grand problème concerne en premier lieu le rôle et la place des États-Unis et leurs relations avec l’Europe. Pour ma part, j’estime que depuis 1992 le terme de “superpuissance” ne suffit plus pour décrire les États-Unis. Terme trop connoté à la guerre froide et trop exclusivement militaire, alors que la suprématie américaine d’aujourd’hui s’exerce aussi bien sur l’économie, la monnaie, la technologie, les domaines militaires que sur les modes de vie, la langue et les produits culturels de masse qui submergent le monde, modelant les pensées fascinant jusqu’aux adversaires des États-Unis.’ [‘The first major issue concerns, firstly, the role and the place of the United States and their relations with Europe. As far as I’m concerned, I think that, since 1992, the term ‘superpower’ has become insufficient to describe the United States. This term is too connotatively related to the cold war and too exclusively military, whereas the American supremacy nowadays is exerted on economy, finances, technology, military domains, as well as on lifestyle, language and mass cultural products that flood the world, shaping its thoughts and fascinating even the enemies of the Unites States’] (qtd. in Fraysse 2000, my translation).
7This is not intended as a prejudicial stereotype along the lines of ‘all Muslims are terrorists’, which has contaminated the views of the Western public sphere starting with the 9/11 moment. Nonetheless, it would be hard to point out a more extreme/-ist manifestation of anti-Americanism than that sprung from the Middle East. Nor is it a contest on the topic ‘who hates America the most?’
8Due to the fact that organisations such as Al-Qaeda or ISIS are multinational and sectarian, any reference to nations and nationalities would better be avoided, which is the reason why the more neutral term ‘communities’ has been preferred.
9Though inexact, this death toll was in circulation in the American media during those days along others, which vary from a few thousands to tens of thousands. According to CNN.com, 29 October 2003, ‘the city’s original estimate of victims exceeded 6700, due in part to the large volume of mistaken missing persons reports’.
10‘All revolutions in art, said someone, are a return to realism. Given that most art forms, in the hands of metropolitan elites, tend to drift away from reality, what could be more bracing or healthy than occasionally to offer authentic news of overlooked thought and feeling? […] What a welcome corrective to the cosy art-for-art’s sake racket which theatre all too easily becomes! Theatre using real people has become a fabulously rich and varied strand which, for many years, has been pumping red cells into the dramatic bloodstream’ (David Hare in The Guardian 30 April 2005).
© The Author(s) 2018
Oana-Celia GheorghiuBritish and American Representations of 9/11https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75250-1_5
5. Extreme Otherness: ‘The Muslim Menace’
Oana-Celia Gheorghiu1
(1)“Dunărea de Jos” University, Galati, Romania
Reconstructing the Other
The phrase extreme otherness is not an alternative formulation of the postmodern philosophical concept of absolute otherness, but an attempt at defining a state of facts (and especially of mind), anchored in the present reality at the social and political levels.1 Reference is made to the degree to which a certain Other is perceived as significantly different and, in many cases, more dangerous than other Others. Specifically, the syntagm between inverted commas, namely ‘the Muslim menace’, borrowed from Edward Said’s preface to the third edition of Orientalism (2003, xv), is intended to point to a constructed image/representation of the Muslim Other, whose identification in contemporary pieces of British and American literature is the primary objective of this undertaking.
In the current international context, any discussion on the otherness of Muslims in relation to the (predominantly Christian) West is likely to employ notions such as terrorism and religious fundamentalism , as well as to deal with organisations such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS (alternatively known as the Islamic State), which advocate hostile and, in many cases, extremely violent attitudes and actions targeted at their Other. ISIS , although much more prominent in recent ne ws than Al-Q aeda, seems to be of less importance for the present discussion, as it emerged after (and, as some political analysts would stress, as a result of) the Western retaliation for the attacks on the WTC of 9/11. It is rather difficult to find a middle way for this topic that avoids the pitfalls of ‘Orientalism’ in the prejudiced understanding the term has acquired after the publication of Said’s work of that title.2 That is why the most appropriate approach envisaged has been that of negotiating between our (Westerners’) Orientalism and their (Eastern Muslims’) Occidentalism, not in order to find justifications for one attitude or the other, but to demonstrate that societal control mechanisms, together with psychosocial imprints and constructs, function for both ‘camps’. The former term, Orientalism, refers in the present discussion to Said’s theory of the created image of the Oriental as Other in the Western culture , whereas the latter, Occidentalism , is a reaction to Said , whose texts point out its complete absence from the world of humanities, as a result of the Orient’s being made incapable by the hegemony of the Occidentals to represent an allegedly superior West.
Published first almost 40 years ago (1978), Palestine-born scholar Said’s Orientalism was heavily influenced by Foucault’s take on discourse and by Gramsci’s understanding of cultural hegemony.3 In the opinion of some important scholars in Oriental studies, such as Bernard Lewis, Orientalism manipulates historical facts in order to reach a ready-made conclusion (1994, 100–118). Since its publication, it has triggered endless debates on the role of the Western (European) powers in the Eastern world, thus contributing to the widespread development of postcolonial theory in academia. In a rather surprising manner, Said succeeds in determining the self-shaming of Western intellectuals for having produced ‘a created body of theory and practice … based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and (most of the time) the Occ ident’ (Said 2003, 6, 2).
In other words, while acknowledging the fact that every depiction of the Other is discursive and representational, Said seems to believe that the Orientalists also have a political agenda. Firstly, Westerners render just a caricature (2003, 108, 285, 290) of the Oriental, owing to their Eurocentric bias, sense of superiority and ignorance. Secondly, as apparent from the book’s motto from Marx (‘they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented’4), it is contended that the Western discourse acquires a hegemonic, authoritative quality which robs the Orientals ‘of the opportunity to speak for themselves, condemning them to being represented and explained from the outside’ (Fischer-Tine 2010, 7). The third and most serious aspect refers to ‘the rise of an explicitly colonial-mind
ed imperialism on the other’ (Said 2003, 18). Starting with the works of some important figures of the nineteenth century, chief among whom are John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, George Eliot and Karl Marx, Orientalism has been seen as ‘a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires—British, French, American—in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced’ (15). In other words, Orientalism is a powerful cultural tool of European colonialism and imperialism , one that is not imposed on individual authors by the hegemony of culture , but which is instead effectively created by them. It is not an aim of this book to dwell more than is necessary on this particular contention, since the ratio of forces between the West and the East has changed, colonialism remaining just a historical landmark. Moreover, in the present geopolitical context , it seems to be the East that colonises the West . Ashamed of its past mistakes in the age of colonialism and imperialism , the West faces a reversal of roles at the moment, allowing the East to ‘conquer’ it both physically (with masses of refugees and migrants) and culturally (by appropriating some of the cultural traits of the Other in order to avoid offending them). Without further speculation as to what this new paradigm of East–West relations may bring in the future, both Orientalism and its counterpoint, Occidentalism , remain useful in the analysis of the literary and non-literary representations of the Other, as long as they are voided of hidden agendas, that is to say, as long as they are kept in the areas of collective mindset and cultural prejudice. While adhering to the idea that each of the two poles of the East–West dichotomy is discursively constructed in the writings and images produced by its Other, and that the truth should not be sought in such representations , this reversal of roles renders Said’s theory of an Orient subverted by a dominant Occ ident almost inapplicable in this context.
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