Abstract
This paper begins by critiquing the too-extreme model of Orientalism,
emphasizing in particular that the correlative notion generated by Said’s binary,
that of Asia’s Occidentalism, is still an essentially Western concept, one that still
implies or assumes a Western perspective on the West’s Asian Other.
Acknowledging Bhabha’s “possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains
difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy,” the paper then briefly
contrasts the Saidian self-other opposition with Ricoeur’s dialectic of self and
other-than-self: unlike the “I” which is constructed or deconstructed as an
autonomous subject that asserts itself, the self is implied reflexively in the
operations, that is, in its relationship(s) with the other than self, to the degree that
self even “passes over into” the other. The author then turns to a discussion of the
recently-published book Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World
Literature (2006), in which she and other writers propose a new paradigm for
cross-cultural and global literary studies, that of other (non-European, non-
Western) “Renaissances.” Here the 15th-16th-century European Renaissance
serves as a model only in a relative sense, for each of the several non-Western
Renaissances (some older and some more recent) explored in the book can be
seen as having come about in and of itself, outside the limits of any sort of
colonial oppression, and thus to have been constitutive of (ethnic, cultural)
selfhood as such. The paper concludes with a discussion of Spivak’s “many
Asia’s” which looks at the positive side of this concept—this “possibility” of a
commonality of many Asias each of which still retains its local identity—as well
as at the limits of Spivak’s view, one which remains in many ways (as too with
Said) an American academic’s perspective on the world.