Abstract

Notwithstanding its own authoritative status now, Edward Said's Orientalism has lived a seditious life and thrived on it. If its characterization of Orientalism as a political doctrine has infuriated critics into denouncing it as an ideologically-motivated work, this has also incited further assaults on the authority of Orientalist knowledge.More than anything else, what accounts for Orientalism's insurgent existence is its relentless transgression of boundaries drawn by disciplines of knowledge and imperial governance. Unsettling received oppositions between the Orient and the Occident, reading literary texts as historical and theoretical events, and cross-hatching scholarly monographs with political tracts, it forced open the authoritative modes of knowing the Other. An indeterminacy emerged in the authority of Western knowledge as it was brought down from its Olympian heights to expose its involvement in Western power. It is this indeterminacy that has served as a provocation to rethink the modern West from the position of the Other, to go beyond Orientalism itself in exploring the implications of its demonstration that the East/West opposition is an externalization of an internal division in the modern West. Even if Orientalism performs this task inadequately, the proliferation of the postcolonial "writing back" would be unimaginable without it