The Orient as a "surrogate and underground self", demonstrated by Bald and the Swet Shop Boys
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What does Said mean when he says that Europe benefited from the Orient as a "surrogate and even underground self"?
When calling the “Orient” a surrogate for Europe, Said was referring to how they have historically affirmed their identity by creating an “other” by which it can compare. The Orient acts as a mirror of sorts, where the Orient becomes–in the imagination of the Orientalist–the antithesis of European moral values and politics. A contemporary example could be the way that Western countries present themselves as bastions of women’s rights to contrast with the “backward” and “anti-liberal” values of the Islamic world. Though there is much to be said about the existence of misogyny in both spheres, this imagined dichotomy has led to what Leila Ahmed refers to as “colonial feminism”; or Western imperialism being carried out in the name of “progressiveness”. Thus, in one sense, the West materially benefits from these countries by projecting negative images onto them and reflecting back positive images of themselves.
Sometimes, however, the Orient can be constructed as an escapist fantasy containing elements absent in European societies. For the Orient to be Europe’s “underground self”, Said may be referring to the ways that they used their imagined Orient as an outlet for their repressed sexual desires, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later in the book, he points to Flaubert, Nerval, Burton, and Lane as examples of writers who integrate sexual fantasies into their depiction of the Orient, using it as “a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe” (Said 263).
Bald discusses a similar phenomenon of Orientalism happening in New Orleans during the late nineteenth century. Bengali peddlers would capitalize off of the image of the “exotic easterner” that middle-class tourists sought out. Like the European travellers that Said speaks of in Orientalism, white Americans used this local mini-Orient as a getaway for “unbridled pleasure and consumption” (Bald 51), which extended to the brothels containing “Eastern” fantasies. This idea is also represented in the “Batalvi” music video by the Swet Shop Boys, which depicts rapidly changing images, many of them women from Bollywood movies. Though they are arguably not sexualized to any extreme extent, it is worth noting that they are predominantly women actresses dancing and performing for an audience–a gendered choice possibly made to refer to the imagined “fairly supine, feminine Orient” (Said 298) that the West has created as an outlet for their desires.
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I love the invocation of Leila Ahmed and the whole feminist spin on Said's idea of Orientalism. Great analysis of "Batalvi" too.