Avant-Garde Orientalism: The Eastern "Other" in Twentieth-Century Travel Narrative and Poetry by David Lehardy Sweet

Abstract

Reviewed by: Avant-Garde Orientalism: The Eastern "Other" in Twentieth-Century Travel Narrative and Poetry by David Lehardy Sweet Tom Conner Sweet, David Lehardy. Avant-Garde Orientalism: The Eastern "Other" in Twentieth-Century Travel Narrative and Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ISBN 978-3-319-50373-8. Pp. 318. This well-argued, persuasive, and densely-written study explores the work of a dozen or so Western Avant-Garde writers, many of them French or Francophone—among them André Gide, André Breton, and Marguerite Duras—who from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries visited and then wrote about the "Orient," an elastic term that includes the Near East (North Africa and the Middle East) and East Asia (India, China, Japan, Indochina). Sweet's book is half theory and half application. It draws on Avant-Garde, postcolonial, and travel literature theories but also engages in close readings of travel writing to formulate a novel theory, Avant-Garde Orientalism, which—though exoticist and colonialist in origin—effectively demonstrates how a Westerner can fruitfully engage with the Orient but avoid the pitfalls of academic Orientalism by considering the aesthetics of diversity with an attitude of provocation and reciprocity. At first sight, nothing could appear more different than Orientalism and the Avant-Garde, the former romantic and escapist—"n'importe où hors du monde" (Baudelaire)—the latter invariably modernist and experimental. Orientalism draws on cultural stereotypes and prejudices linked to colonialism and imperialism, which Edward Said exposed in Orientalism (1978), laying the foundations of a critical, so-called postcolonial discourse. Sweet's book is neither a traditional reading of Orientalism nor an attack on postmodernism but rather an attempt to bring out the inherently contradictory character of Orientalism. There is a host of Avant-Garde Western writers "whose ideas about the Orient don't conform to the postcolonial picture of orientalism as the servant of colonialism or as the cultural judge of the East" (2). For example, Gide's North African oeuvre is a celebration of his own ambivalent and exploitative sexuality but in later works, such as Voyage au Congo, Gide denounces colonialism. The same critical ambivalence characterizes Duras. André Michaux's A Barbarian in China and Roland Barthes's Empire of the Signs also suggest the possible superiority of Asian culture and underscore how a text can be Avant-Garde, orientalist and post-colonial all at once. There is no shortage of progressive Avant-Garde authors. Breton denounces colonialism; Jean Genet denounces the French war in Algeria and supports the Palestinians and the Black Panthers. In the final analysis, Avant-Garde Orientalism actually is post-modern [End Page 221] insofar as it critiques colonialism as well as the hegemony of the West and the "global monoculture" modernism heralds, which modernism rather endorses or at least accepts as a necessary evil in order for the Orient to modernize and catch up with the West (3). To these Avant-Garde orientalists, the Orient held out the promise of being the last bastion of diversity, uniqueness, and non-conformism. Sweet avoids the pitfall of generalization and is careful to analyze what sets his many authors apart thanks to his method of "simultaneous cultural contrasts" (Robert Delaunay), which makes it possible to expose starkly different and oftentimes contradictory portraits of the Orient, including several transnational English-language authors of the new millennium. Tom Conner St. Norbert College (WI) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French