A Neoimperial Discourse on the Middle East

Abstract

The critique of orientalism has had a major impact upon Middle
Eastern and Islamic studies and in other areas of western and American
intellectual life. However, despite this impact, there is no question that traditional
orientalist representations of the Arab and Islamic maintain a striking
virulence, that they remain deeply marked by imperialist and racist
legacies, and that scholars often recoup and rehabfitate such perspectives
even when they seem to be challenging them. I would like to illustrate these
observations through a consideration of the work of the American author
Paul Bowles and of the treatment his work has received by American critics.
It is, of course, customary for scholars to justify their work by stating
that their topic has not received the attention that it deserves. However, if I
say that Bowels's representation of the Arab/Muslim has been neglected
strikingly, I am being honest as well as self-serving. Bowles is America3
most prominent expatriate author and is also the only American whose fiction
and nonfiction have dealt largely with Morocco and North Africa. It is
natural to assume that his work and its treatment can provide special insight
into the fate and fortune of the critique of orientalism, especially in the present
context of a Bowles revival that is becoming a veritable flux.
Bowles has reflected, variously and throughout his literary career,
many of the standard features that have characterized the representation of
the Arab/Muslim since the nineteenthcentury. This is apparent in his interviews,
nonfiction essays, and travel pieces, but also in the short stories and
novels that have appeared for nearly fifty years; from the 1940s into the
1990s. In 1952, for example, he told Harvey Breit in an interview in the
New York Times:
I don’t think we are likely to get to know the Muslims very well
and I suspect that if we should we would find them less sympathetic
than we do at present and I believe the same applies to their
getting to know us. At the moment they admire us for our technique
and I don’t think they would fmd more than that compatible.
Their culture is essentially barbarous, their mentality is that of a
purely predatory people ...