Transorientalism in Art, Fashion, and Film

Inventions of Identity

Adam Geczy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350060166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Combining transnationalism and exoticism, transorientalism is the new orientalism of the age of globalization. With its roots in earlier times, it is a term that emphasizes alteration, mutation, and exchange between cultures.
While the familiar orientalisms persist, transorientalism is a term that covers notions like the adoption of a hat from a different country for Turkish nationalist dress, the fact that an Italian could be one of the most influential directors in recent Chinese cinema, that Muslim women artists explore Islamic womanhood in non-Islamic countries, that artists can embrace both indigenous and non-indigenous identity at the same time. This is more than nostalgia or bland nationalism. It is a reflection of the effect that communication and representation in recent decades have brought to the way in which national identity is crafted and constructed-yet this does not make it any less authentic. The diversity of race and culture, the manner in which they are expressed and transacted, are most evident in art, fashion, and film. This much-needed book offers a refreshing, informed, and incisive account of a paradigm shift in the ways in which identity and otherness is moulded, perceived, and portrayed.

1

HISTORIES OF CULTURAL FABRICATION

What then is truth? A mobile mass of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which are decorated poetically and rhetorically, increased and transferred, and which after lengthy usage are for a group of people considered fixed, canonic and binding: truths are illusions that have been forgotten they are thus.

NIETZSCHE¹

In popular nationalist vernacular, one’s country is mutually exclusive with personal conduct and activity. One’s relationship to a country, culture, or creed is a highly linguistic affair, signaled in the repeated use of the word “meaning” in question of belonging. Alternatively there are actions and beliefs that are thought to be threatening to the nationalist stronghold which are blighted the prefix “un-.” At both poles, from the stalwart nationalist to the tentative subaltern, what it means to be of a race or country is a constant point of contention. Aside from the many material features cited for this reference, the events that lead to this meaning are more than usually traumatic and, even when recalling loss, triumphant. The components of what it means to one or another group are traditionally based on recognizable objects and of widely known past events, all of which are given a pictorially iconic character, usually starting with the flag. More elusive if not more structurally valid and the more subtle are the events, changes, upheavals, and manipulations that have coalesced into the stable and concrete concept of nation. The concept of rootedness from where there is only shifting sands makes the famous quote from Nietzsche strongly apposite. Nationhood is carved from many things, but it is conceived as immutable and commensurate with the truthfulness of one’s own being. Nietzsche continues: “We still do not know where this urge for truth comes from: for until now we have only heard the obligation from society that it exist: to be truthful means to lie according to the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the compulsion to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a common-bound style.”² If we remove the reproach for now, what remains is the strength of common language and its transference into conviction and into psychopathology. This chapter traverses the tenuous and delicate subject of the relationship between individual, culture, and belonging with the emphasis on the ways in which it has been formed. The basis for this formation can be ironic, traumatic, or both. For some sense of clarity on a subject that emphasizes the convoluted and obscure, this chapter will be divided into two parts: the macrocosmic (nation, countries), and the microcosmic (individuals, subjects). In setting up a philosophical set of co-ordinates, the focus is not limited to the Orient, as general as the term may be, but takes a broader view of the assumptions and re-assumptions of national identity in order to form a picture of its pliability and the role of imagination, to show the oscillation between fictive construction and inner necessity.

The net image of all of this could be unnerving since to reveal the instability of one’s soil is to destabilize the security of home. But the intention is not to instill anxiety but to show how the superstructure of national coherence is built on a cloud, except that some clouds may be a little denser than others.

Making nations

Another helpful synopsis of the twists of identity formation is offered by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek in a discussion of Russian nationhood:

There were three steps in the formation of Russian national identity: first, the substantial starting point (premodern Orthodox Russia); then, the violent modernization enforced by Peter the Great, which continued throughout the eighteenth century and created a new French-speaking elite; finally, after 1812, the rediscovery of “Russianness”, the return to forgotten authentic origins. It is crucial to bear in mind that this rediscovery of authentic roots was only possible through and for the educated eyes of the French-speaking elite: “authentic” Russia existed only for the “French gaze”. This is why it was a French composer (working at the imperial court) who wrote the first opera in Russian and thus started the tradition, and why Pushkin himself had to use French words to make clear to his readers (and to himself) the true meaning of his authentic Russian terms. Later, of course, the dialectical movement goes on: “Russianness” immediately splits into liberal populism and conservative Slavophilism, and the process culminates in the properly dialectical coincidence of modernity and primitivism: the fascination of the early twentieth-century modernists with ancient barbaric cultural forms.³

It is also instructive that Zizek concludes with the binary of the civilized modernist observing the primitive and barbaric. A barbarian is simply the earlier version of the Oriental, deriving from the Greek barbaroi, meaning “foreign.” (However the subsequent usages of the word add a frisson of violence and transgression, which is also essential to the Orient, as it enshrines something noble but also distinctly different and daring.) The exchanges between Russian and French are also vividly staged in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, when Pierre, during the siege of Moscow, in his dealings with people on the street becomes self-conscious of the fact that he speaks Russian with a French accent, thereby leaving himself vulnerable to the defensive violence against all things French. Yet it is Pierre who is the stalwart of Russian cultural integrity, in all its tenacity and fragility. But Pierre comes to this realization once aware of the changes in power relations, in which language inevitably plays a part.

Pushkin, Tolstoy’s great predecessor and rival for Greatest Russian Writer, was from the start embroiled in Orientalist narratives of some sort or another. For although he hailed from one of Russia’s most prominent nobility, his maternal grandfather was an African, Ibrahim Hannibal. As the legend would have it, he was an Abyssinian prince whom the Turks took hostage, and redelivered as a gift to Peter the Great in 1705, by a Russian envoy who had rescued him from the court of the Ottoman Sultan. Hannibal became Peter’s adopted son, received military training in France, and eventually became a general in the Russian army. He was later granted a massive estate, Mikhailovskoe, on the border of today’s Latvia by Peter’s daughter Empress Elizabeth. It was here that Pushkin wrote some of his greatest works. Pushkin was also a great admirer of the great literary Orientalist, Byron, especially evident in his fascination with the character Don Juan. His exotic ancestor was also a great source of literary capital as seen in the incomplete novella The Moor of Peter the Great, and in instances such as in Eugene Onegin when the protagonist yearns for “the sun of my Africa.”⁴

Yearning is a central part of the envisioning and conceptualization of nationhood: the yearning to return, the yearning of what was or what could be. They are powerful expressions of desire in which the addressee, the state, is everywhere and nowhere. The decenteredness and the yawning absence betoken its power. Nation, with a capital “N” is an empty signifier around which selective incidents and signs of the past and present come to rally. In the words of Zizek again in an earlier study on the psychology of political economy:

in a political discourse, the Master-Signifier (Our Nation) is this kind of empty signifier which stands for the impossible fullness of meaning, that is, its meaning is “imaginary” in the sense that its content is impossible to positivize—when you ask a member of the Nation to define in what the identity of this nation persists, his ultimate answer will always be, “I can’t say, you must feel it, it’s it, what our lives are really about.”⁵

The compulsions of Nation are typically at their strongest when there is the sense of something lost. This can range from the sense in the United States of the country having lost its grip on world power and economic dominance to the feeling in developing powers such as India, which, as we will later see, by degrees clings misty eyed to a shapelessly obscure, long-lost past.

Just as the victors write history, the priorities given to which histories are written belong preponderantly to those meting out funding, which are the dominant states. Thus, as Davies remarks, “siren voices sing that today’s important countries are also those whose past is most deserving of examination, that a more comprehensive spectrum of historical knowledge can be safely ignored.”⁶ It is also in the interests of these dominant histories that the presumption remains that the country in question is coherent, and observations of coherence are nonetheless serenely made from a standpoint of clarity and circumscription. Equally the studies of the great ancient civilizations—Greece, Egypt, Rome—work from standard assumptions, most often conveniently gleaned from art and architecture, however much their empire may have expanded and contracted. Indeed it is the visual manifestations of culture, from the Egyptian Pyramids to the Roman Coliseum, that tend to give a state and culture its metonymic balance, however much that they too were prey to alteration and decay.

Davies’ book, Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations is a set of connected historical essays on the appearance and disappearance of countries in the region of greater Europe, including Russia. His study can scarcely contain the diverse and ongoing shifts in borderlines and borderlands, however his book is a series of enlightening case studies that lays the groundwork for thinking of country, state, and nation in a less homogenizing fashion, as susceptible to time and change as any individual mortal soul. One of the salutary effects of this growing consciousness of the vicissitudes of culture has been a renewed interest in looking at this mutability. It is an area of study that was also borne out by post-millennial events, such as Russia’s lawful-unlawful reclamation of Crimea, and Britain’s “Brexit,” which in turn has stirred up renewed debate about Scottish independence. If this were to take place it would be hard to use the well-worn term “United Kingdom,” since Great Britain, divested of its most lavish colony, India, since 1947, would no longer be great at all.

The many histories and cultures bear witness to their sheer perishability. When scrutinized, these histories show that any culture is constituted by a diversity of conditions, embedded in the material and eidetic moment. That is, they are fashioned from the political, geographic, and technological circumstances, and much more. But how they are is impossible to gauge since all these factors build to an idea that is immaterial but helps to organize these data that makes the individual comprehensible to the group, and vice versa. Davies begins with Tolosa, which made up the majority of the southwest region of what is now France, the state of the Visigoths from 418–507 and ends with the Soviet Union (1924–1991). The rise and fall of states, he argues, makes for consternation amongst historians because the causes vary and are often “random.” As he observes

the definition of a nation should include its past and future, its memories and illusions. To paraphrase an old critic of Renan, a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past, a hatred of their present neighbors, and dangerous illusions about their future. (For example, today’s Slovenes are united by myths about a Slovene kingdom in the eighth century, their hatred of [at this moment] the Croats, and the illusion that they are on the way to becoming the next Switzerland.) Each historical form is a totality which encompasses not only its retroactively posited past, but also its own future, a future which is by definition never realized: it is the immanent future of the present, so that, when the present form disintegrates, it undermines also its past and future.⁷

Nationhood is porous but at the same time what in political economy and sociology is called a universal. It is held up as an ideological fait accompli in which biology and destiny are intertwined. For even if this is a fantasy, to think otherwise is to encounter destabilization and ruin. Nationhood is a mythic solipsism from which any one of us can only escape by degrees; to be an exile is to be an exile from somewhere. To be stateless is to feel a pathological lack that is tantamount to orphanage or paternal rejection: the state, like t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Praise
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Histories of Cultural Fabrication
• 2 Occidentalizing the Orient: Modern Turkey
• 3 The Global Turkish Artist
• 4 Art and the Islamic Female Diaspora
• 5 “China,” or Contemporary Chinoiserie
• 6 Japanese Recreations: Between Kawakubo and Cosplay
• 7 Indian Interdependence
• 8 From Primitive to Provocative: First Nations in End Times
• 9 Conclusion: Floating Signifiers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright