Orientalism Otherwise: A Poetics of Adjacency in Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental

Abstract

This essay suggests that we reconsider orientalism by including women’s largely disregarded perspectives about the orient. It focuses on Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental as a model for disorientalizing the Orient through a poetics of adjacency – a creative process that puts voices, events, and circumstances side-by-side using modes borrowed from narrative’s sister arts – to suggest a basis for an orientalism that doesn’t forget Said’s Orientalism, but rather sets beside it another orient that modifies it. Generated by aesthetic strategies from cinematography and music, Djavadi creates the disoriental subject, one who has left the Orient but carries with her an alternate orient emerging from comparative practice built upon modes of recontextualization in the Kuleshov effect, of juxtaposition in rear projection, and of inversion suggested by the 45-rpm record. Notions of disorientation, beside, and cultural collage underwrite Djavadi’s plan of besidedness, which conceives an orient for the disoriental subject.