Stuplime Orientalism

Abstract

The essay reads Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism through Sianne Ngai’s category of the “stuplime”. Unlike the noble emotions elicited by the Kantian sublime, the stuplime causes the ugly feelings of tedium, excitation, fatigue. In the Kantian sublime, viewing subjects experience an overwhelming feeling which impresses on them their own inadequacy; in my reading of stuplime orientalism, the “Orient” becomes the object of this “inadequacy”. This shift from inadequate subjects to inadequate objects is one manifestation of the political valence of the stuplime, a means by which control is maintained both of the “Orient” as a colonial project and of the orientalist’s mind. As Ngai argues, however, the political potential of ugly feelings is always ambivalent: stuplime orientalism can therefore also be coopted through curation of stuplime orientalist detail, which I deploy in the second half of this essay to read Jade Snow Wong’s memoir, Fifth Chinese Daughter. Resisting the urge to summarize Jade Snow Wong’s exhaustively descriptive rice passages, I delineate an alternative interpretation to the prevailing view that she merely self-orientalizes, instead suggesting a reading that engages histories of denigrated racial formation and labour precisely through, and not in spite of, stuplime orientalist detail.