SubStance

Madeleine Dobie's Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism joins the already substantial body of criticism that has been critiquing, debating, and striving to transcend Edward Said's account of Orientalism. Dobie explains in political and intellectual terms her reasons for contributing one more volume to those efforts. Since Orientalism appeared in 1978, the trends Said gathered under that name have maintained their power and even extended their cultural reach. Western representations of the East continue to be shaped by racist stereotypes honed in the colonial period, and those images are partly responsible for mounting anti-Americanism in African and Middle Eastern countries such as Sudan and Iraq. Images of veiled Arab women are being deployed with increasing frequency to signify the perceived threat of Islam. In France, Foreign Bodies' main locus of concern, exoticism has retained its appeal, and the debates over the wearing of the veil/hijab that began in 1989 with the famous affaire du lycée de Creil continue amidst rising French anxieties over Muslim immigration and French identity. Dobie's aim in intervening in these ongoing debates is to dismantle the oppositions structuring Orientalist representations, including those of métropole and colony, center and margins. Her political goal is to change the current predicament.

If other scholars have not managed to achieve either objective, in Dobie's view, it is because they remain constrained by the terms of Said's groundbreaking analysis and by broader trends in the reception of Michel Foucault's writings. The problem she identifies in Said is one involving abstract theorization: because Said reduces or "compresses" historical, political, and cultural levels of analysis in order to foreground the discursive, he obfuscates crucial links and mediations that exist between the material world and its representations. This prevents him from formulating difficult questions about Orientalism's relation to colonial interests at any given historical juncture, and from engaging with complexities, gaps, and discontinuities in the historical record. Subsequent critical reliance on his theorization has resulted in what Dobie describes as a nearly "metaleptical reversal" of Orientalist discourse and colonial history—a substitution she believes has been masked in recent years by recourse to the rather imprecise, abstract notion of "colonial discourse." The unintended consequences in Said, and for critics writing in his wake (including Bedhad in Belated Travelers and [End Page 189] Bhabha in his notion of hybridity), are the erasure of the history of resistance, the unilateral attribution of power to Orientalism and the West, and the reinforcement of the "historiographic myth of whiteness" (14).

Dobie positions her intervention in relation to those of Michel de Certeau and Aijax Ahmad. She concurs with de Certeau's view that Foucault's conceptualization of power and discourse are historical abstractions that "threat[en] to erase the boundaries of power and, with them, the history of resistance" (22). In Foreign Bodies, she hopes to provide the response de Certeau deems necessary—that is, "a more varied and complex account of the dynamics of power and resistance" (22) in the field of her choice—orientalist discourse. She envisages an account along the lines of what Aijax Ahmad has termed a "micrological account" of a "determinant set of mediations" (cited in Foreign Bodies, 16). Dobie concentrates on links between cultural production and historical contexts, including the colonial and world historical, rather than on the political and production-related contexts Ahmad had in mind. Her project aims to elucidate the origins of the "paradox of our modernity," that is, "the contradictory relation between our experience of political liberalism and the ongoing history of racial and sexual prejudice and injustice" (11). To that end, she examines the part played by the West's encounter with the "other" in the genesis of both.

Dobie achieves analytic coherence by concentrating on one figure of the "other" she names "Oriental Woman." Her approach to this figure is consistent with her view that prior critical interventions reveal both the impossibility of moving past Orientalism and, inversely, the...