Chen Xiaomei. Occidentalism:
A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China. New York: Oxford, 1995.
As the title suggests, this
book is in many ways a response to Edward Said's influential work, Orientalism.
Chen Xiaomei seeks to rectify Said's thesis by discussing aspects of
cross-cultural images of the "other" that he neglected. While Said
focused exclusively on western imperialist constructions of the
"Orient," Chen takes as her subject images of the "Occident"
produced in twentieth-century China, and particularly in the post-Mao period.
Her analysis of works from Chinese television, poetry, drama, and fiction lead
her to challenge Said's model in significant ways.
First, she argues that
"counter-discourse" is possible – that is, that people living in
colonized or semi-colonized countries are capable of constructing images of the
West that do not merely reinforce the culturally imperialist discourse of
Orientalism. Rather, as she demonstrates, such images have become powerful
instruments of liberation and oppression in power struggles within China
itself. This theme is worked out in the first three chapters (on the television
series He Shang, on "Occidentalist" theater productions of
Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Brecht, and on western modernist poetry and the menglong
movement) and in her postscript on the 1992 best-seller A Chinese Woman in
Manhattan. In each case, Chen shows that glamorization of western society
(in He Shang and A Chinese Woman) or the adoption of western
literary techniques (in theater and poetry) served more as strategies of
liberation against the oppressive Chinese political regime than as a form of
"self-colonization" on the part of Chinese writers and audiences.
The second major contribution
this book makes to the field of cross-cultural literary studies is to reveal
how very interconnected are the histories of modern "Occidental" and
"Oriental" literary forms. This theme is introduced in the chapter on
menglong poetry and elaborated in chapters 4 and 5 on theater. In these
chapters, Chen shows that poets and playwrights in China and the west have
participated in a form of cultural exchange based on
"misunderstandings" or "misreadings" of the
"other." In using these terms, she does not mean mistaken or false
readings. Rather, she means "a view of a text or a cultural event by a
'receiver' community that differs in important ways from the view of that same
phenomenon in the community of its origins" (p. 96). Examples of such
back-and-forth reformulations include Ezra Pound's use of the Chinese ideograph
and his later influence on discourse surrounding menglong poetry in
China, and Mei Lanfang's influence on Thornton Wilder's plays which later came
to provide inspiration for Gao Xingjian's Wildman.
Chapter 6 is slightly out of
place, in that it moves back in time to the May Fourth period and in that it
suddenly throws the spotlight on gender as a central category of analysis. Her
main point here is to show that young Chinese men in May Fourth theater adopted
western feminism to further their own attack against the Confucian
establishment, which "turned out to be yet another way in which Western
fathers subjugated and colonized non-Western women" (p. 138). While Chen
could have improved the stylistic and thematic integration of this section into
the rest of the book, there is a logic to its inclusion. First, it reveals that
Occidentalist discourse has the potential to be liberating for some groups and
simultaneously oppressive for others. Second, it forms a historical link
between the work of post-Mao and May Fourth intellectuals.
R. David Arkush (Journal of
Asian Studies 56.1: 144-7) justifiably questions Chen on a few points. Most
importantly, he (and I) would have liked to see some more attention payed to
the political context and the state's forms of Occidentalist discourse.
Nonetheless, I cannot agree with Arkush that there is little "of use in
the concept of occidentalism" (p. 47). Rather, the book stands as one
important corrective to the unifaceted model of Orientalism Said first
advanced.
Sigrid Schmalzer
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