Is East East and West West?

Abstract

There are three main themes insistently pursued throughout the course of this book, in an endeavour to provide evidence for a critique of the seemingly self-evident and ‘essential’ East/West dichotomy. The first is that there is no such thing as the Orient (a variation on/perversion of the famous/notorious Lacanian statement that ‘La femme n’existe pas’ [‘The Woman does not exist’]); the second is that insofar as the Orient ‘exists’, it is, just like its inevitable opposite twin, the Occident, nothing but a performative (a variation on/perversion of Judith Butler’s assertion that ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ as genders are performatives); the third is that the Oriental and Occidental performatives chronically create a third one, that of the Oriental Transvestite, akin to that of the child or, alternatively, the drag, also a variation on Butler’s assertion of the drag as a transgressive (although not necessarily a subversive) performance. As becomes instantly apparent, these claims seem to rely heavily on a categorical analogy between the Orient and femininity (and the West and masculinity), which is already present in the germinal critique of Orientalism, namely, in Edward Said’s path-breaking book, Orientalism:

The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be ‘Oriental’ in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be—that is, submitted to being—made Oriental.

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West