Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel by Srinivas Aravamudan (review)

Abstract

Aravamudan, Srinivas. 2011. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $91.00 hc. $31.00 sc. E-book $7.00-$30.00. xiv + 342 pp.Has the Enlightenment-as the historical threshold for the philosophical positions, institutional events, and epistemological infrastructures that we associate with modernity-been too hastily tied to Orientalism and European imperialism and to the political oppressions they enabled well into the twentieth century? Although Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) focuses mainly on Europe's self-serving nineteenth-century version of instrumentalized knowledge, the account resonates with critiques that implicate the Enlightenment, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's account of its quick march to fascism and death camps in the twentieth century and Michel Foucault's critique of the Enlightenment as a facade for will-to-power. Given this powerful critical alliance lined up against the so-called age of awakening, Srinivas Aravamudan's characterization of his book, Enlightenment Orientalism, as a heretical exercise is perhaps not just tongue in cheek (3). Rather, it is an acknowledgment of the widespread influence Said's work in particular, and postcolonial studies in general, has had over the years in the reevaluation of European thought. While postcolonial scholars may find Aravamudan's introductory hypothesis-that Enlightenment interrogation was not just bent on the domination of the other but also aimed at mutual understanding across cultural differences-provocative, this is not news to scholars of the early modern era (3). For decades, scholars of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century have complained about the mistaken and anachronistic use of the terms of nineteenth-century imperialism for East- West encounters of an earlier time. Where Aravamudan's work goes further than these existing criticisms of the totalizing binaries of a monolithic Orientalism is in the solid research that unearths a dizzying range of genres within which a complex self-scrutiny of Europe was under way and that details the strategies through which imaginative fiction (rather than scientific, philosophical, historical, or ethnographic discourse) constituted a powerful anti-foundationalist strain in the European Enlightenment. In this comparative study, Aravamudan shows that eighteenth-century English and French fiction in a variety of modes- Oriental tales, pseudoethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires-were engaged in a contest with what would later emerge as the canonical forms of domestic realism. The book demonstrates that Orientalist fiction was much more than a tool for othering the non-European; in effect it produced a counter- Enlightenment of sorts by challenging the tenets of social and epistemological realism-a discourse that, in engendering scientific rationalism, empiricism, and skepticism, is now widely regarded as a key legacy of the Enlightenment. Rich intertextual readings produce hitherto unacknowledged genetic traces and new genealogies: from Giovanni Paolo Marana's spy fiction and Antoine Galland's Arabian Nights' Entertainments to Aphra Behn's and Daniel Defoe's continuations of these genres, from Montesquieu's Persian Letters to the writings of Oliver Goldsmith and Elizabeth Hamilton, and from the work of Fontanelle through to Swiftand Voltaire.The book is divided into two parts: the first half deals with pseudoethnographies or narratives that rely exclusively on the theme of the external foreigner delivering home truths, which thus install a critic of European culture as an embodied externality (29). The second half of the book discusses the proliferation of Oriental tales as transcultural allegories where the generic experimentation of the Enlightenment looks beyond national realism and identity politics and moves into the bizarre and the fascinating: interplanetary adventures, beast fables, it-narratives, and scandal chronicles. …