Orientalist Views Research Articles

Patrons and the Translation of Arabic Fiction into English: Guilty Until Proven Otherwise

Translating contemporary Arabic fiction into English gained momentum after the Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. However, this activity and the ensuing translated output, have been considered the outcome of the negative hidden agendas adopted by the patrons who commission the translations. Indeed, these patrons have been branded as repressive agents that advocate orientalist views since the fiction they select for translation reinstates the stereotypical images of the Arabs, and hence fulfills the Anglo-Saxon readers’ expectations and the patrons’ financial aspirations. This paper attempts to look at the other side of the coin and considers the positive role patrons have played in translating contemporary Arabic fiction into English.

Breaking down racial barriers? The Maharaja of Patiala’s 1935 Australian cricket tour of India

To a great extent, popular representations of Indo–Australian relations have been viewed through the lens of cricket – the national game in both countries. Despite a proliferation of writing on colonial Indian cricket, Australia’s contribution to it has been largely ignored. In October 1935, a team of cricketers embarked on the first Australian tour to the subcontinent.1 The tour was conceived and financed by the Maharaja of Patiala to assist preparation of an official Indian team to tour Britain in 1936. In this paper, I will draw upon primary sources and interviews to help articulate the complex colonial relationship between the East and the West, whilst locating the ambiguous position of Australia within this. Despite predominantly conforming to the Orientalist view that Westerners considered themselves a superior ‘race’, the Australian cricketers demonstrated an atypical cultural sensitivity to the Orient and the ‘Other’.

A Voice from Troubled Japan

A Voice from Troubled Japan Noriko Kawahashi (bio) The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion was a source of encouragement and inspiration for me when I was a Princeton University graduate student from the late 1980s through the beginning of the 1990s. I would read the articles by the shining stars in feminist studies of religion and wonder when I, too, would be able to write and publish articles like these. Eventually, I became a professional scholar in Japan, where in 2003 I was privileged to be a guest editor with Masako Kuroki of “Feminism and Religion in Contemporary Japan,” a special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, an English-language journal published by Nanzan University. In our preface, we wrote that JFSR “is a ground-breaking journal of work in religion and feminism. It is our hope that this special issue will serve as the occasion to initiate, at some point in the future, a Japanese journal similar to JFSR. We expect that will require us not only to improve the quality of researchers and raise the level of work in the fields concerned but also to carry out institutional reform of religious studies in Japan.”1 Today, more than a decade later, there is still no journal like JFSR being published in Japan. However, the roundtable discussion on “Feminist Theology and Religious Diversity” in fall 2000, for example, and the articles in the twentieth anniversary issue in fall 2005, inspired and empowered my colleagues and me. We have learned a great deal from those pages. At present, I am a member of the international board and occasionally take part in editorial review work on JFSR. Thinking back to when I was a graduate student, I feel very proud of my JFSR involvement. The present state of religious studies in Japan, however, is nothing to feel very proud about. Women make up only about 10 percent of the board of directors of the Japanese Association for Religious Studies. What I have noticed in pursuing religious studies in America and conducting my research in the academic community in Japan is the existence of a double standard in the Japanese academic community. That is, international conferences such as the International Association for the History of Religions may give the impression that religious studies in Japan is concerned about gender parity and feminism, but the reality is different when attending a Japanese conference. The “patriarchs” of Japan’s religious studies understand that it would be politically incorrect to make light of gender issues when they speak at a meeting of the American Academy of Religion, for example, but they appear to think such statements are acceptable at domestic conferences. [End Page 153] Furthermore, some Japanese male religious studies scholars are lenient toward sexual harassment. Regarding the gender discrimination to be found in religious studies in Japan, see the article I co-authored with Kayoko Komatsu and Masako Kuroki, “Gendering Religious Studies: Reconstructing Religion and Gender Studies in Japan.”2 I would point out also how unfortunate it is that such outstanding feminist theologians as Hisako Kinukawa and Satoko Yamaguchi have been unable to find full-time posts in Japan. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in March 2011, Japan has seen increasingly widespread discussion of the public role to be played by religious studies and the social contribution to be made by religion. Regrettably, however, gender is often lacking from that discussion. There is an assumption that religion should play a disaster relief role, and this assumption has just further hardened conventional views of gender roles. In a sense, humanitarian aid has had a contrary (i.e., nonhumane) effect of reinforcing gender imbalance, and this phenomenon deserves a critical look. Moreover, there are even religion professionals and scholars who, though they are women, are not prepared to take a gender-critical point of view. I strongly reject the orientalist view that Japanese women in general are backward and still imprisoned within patriarchy. However, JFSR has an important role to play because its feminisms provide a critical force and impact that can serve as pressure applied to Japan from the outside, and so can...

Engaging future Asia: Techno-orientalisms, ethnography, speculative fiction

ABSTRACTIn an era of global capitalism's growing spread, and discourses of an ‘Asia-Pacific Century’ and the rise of China, India and the Asian ‘Tiger Economies’, and the increasing location of R&D and technological production plants in various countries in Asia, it is surprising but also revealing that imaginings of a technologically advanced Asia are few and far between. The perspective of speculative fiction — the domain wherein are expressed scientific and technological aspirations, prospects and possibilities — is interesting in this regard: while there has been a small amount of significant Asian anglophone speculative fiction writing, the main themes pursued by Asian writers continue to be those of social development and social (in)justice. In contrast, there has been a significant tradition of imaginings of Asian nations and identities by non-Asian writers, which are thus left to dominate the ways and manners in which Asian futures are articulated. While there are expectedly orientalist views of Asia's techno-futures, there are also more engaged and knowledgeable accounts which see aspects of Asian culture and society as shaping those futures and inhibiting the positive potential of technology. The dystopian view of future Asia also neglects the potential harmonies between positive aspects of Asian culture, and their enhancement by technology.

Hamas and its Vision of Development

This article accounts for the conceptualisation of development by the Palestinian Islamist party, Hamas. It concludes that Hamas's position on development can be seen in either two ways: 1) as broadly similar to mainstream neoliberal development; or 2) as significantly different and an alternative type of development. Which view taken depends on whether an Orientalist or non-Orientalist approach to understanding development is employed (with Orientalism linking development, modernity and progress with the West and denying it to the non-West). While an Orientalist view assumes that development only occurs within narrow parameters, obliging the non-West to ‘catch up’, a non-Orientalist approach would study Islam on its own terms—and therefore see Hamas's approach to development as an alternative to mainstream thinking. To account for this, the article studies the basis of knowledge in Orientalism and Islamic thought alongside Hamas's rise from its foundation in 1987 to its control of Gaza in mid-2007.

Proxidistant Reading: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of the Nahḍah in U.S. Comparative Literary Studies

Abstract Courses that teach modern Arabic literature, particularly those that address students of comparative literature or other non-specialists, often focus on relatively recent exemplars of the canon. Most engage texts that hail from the mid- to late twentieth century—a period in which the fate of “new” narrative genres (for example, the novel) is well established—rather than those that evoke a time when the boundaries between “tradition” and “modernity” were in flux. Yet a critical pedagogy of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Arab “renaissance” (nahḍah) could bring modern Arabic literature more squarely into the fold of empire and postcolonial studies, critical translation theory, and the resurgent fields of world and comparative literature. This essay reflects on both the theoretical importance and the practical experience of teaching the dynamics of early Arab literary modernity to non-specialist audiences—both undergraduate and graduate—in comparative literature. Two problems emerge in this context: first, the self-Orientalism of nahḍah texts, which often uphold a thesis of post-Ottoman “decline” and post-European “awakening” and thus reinforce Orientalist views of Arab-Islamic culture in a post-9/11 era of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment; second, a relative dearth (to date) of high-quality, in-print, and affordable English translations. Conjoining comparatist methods of “close” and “distant” reading, I propose a twofold praxis of proxidistant reading to address these problems of world, time, and access: a praxis that connects modern Arabic literature to modern Western and world literatures in ways that assume neither easy equivalence nor absolute non-relation between adab and literature, one modern and another, and the modifiers Arabic, Western, and world. First, while nahḍah intellectuals reengineered the Arab-Islamic idea of adab—once coterminous with knowledge itself—to translate the modern Western idea of literature, premodern adab and its modern Arabic “nemesis” share more than nahḍah ideology concedes: both can be narrowly “literary” or radically transdisciplinary, belletristic or “lowbrow,” formal ( fuṣḥā) or dialectal (ʿāmmiyyah). Thus I suggest that we read nahḍah texts as testimonies to the discontinuous continuity—or continuity in death—of premodernity and modernity, “Wests” and “Easts,” interrogating conceptions of world and time that exaggerate either the proximity or the distance of literary-cultural epistemes, genres, and modes of expression across these postulated divides. Second, I propose that we read translations of nahḍah “literature” both up close to and afar from original texts and from the imagined purview of the “literary.” To impart a prismatic vision of the nahḍah to students who must rely on limited English translations, I suggest peri-literary approaches—“time-travel” to the nahḍah through secondary sources on the period, as well as through primary sources (e.g., novels) set in the era yet composed in later periods—and para-literary readings that place the many forms that nahḍah “literature” actually took (historical, sociopolitical, scientific, popular) alongside those that fit its belletristic theoretical mold. By teaching an earlier “modern” than the “modern Arabic literature” comparatists typically teach and by comparing the nahḍah with similar “renaissances” elsewhere in the non-Western world, I argue, we can help students understand Arabic-speaking cultures not as objects of global modernity but as complex subjects thereof—and develop a complementary (or contestatory) vision of the rise of world and comparative literatures usually imputed to nineteenth-century Europe. Such a pedagogy, I suggest, might de-Orientalize U.S. studies of Arabic literature.

From ‘Primitive’ Artisans to ‘Modern’ Craftsmen: Colonialism, Culture, and Art Education in the Late Nineteenth-Century Punjab

By closely reading the debates on the art school curriculum within the Indian civil and educational bureaucracy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this article analyses the fundamental shift in the theoretical and methodological basis of art education in colonial art schools, which were founded for the revival of Oriental arts and craftsmanship through western ideas of visual literacy. A detailed analysis of the founding decades of the Mayo Schools of Art demonstrates the intersection of aesthetic discourses in art education with the Orientalist views of Indian society as a traditional, tribal caste-based society. The colonial sociology of occupational castes became the conduit to recruit and train artisan castes in the Mayo School of Art. While this colonial policy of caste-based education in Punjab favoured artisan castes in their occupational careers, it restricted the enterprising students of artisan families who wished to pursue their careers independently of their hereditary associations.

Transgression as a Rule: German-Polish Cross-border Cooperation, Border Discourse and EU Enlargement by Ulrich Best

Transgression as a Rule: German-Polish Cross-border Cooperation, Border Discourse and EU Enlargement by Ulrich Best

A Hegelian study of Chinese people’s pursuit of human rights in the Tiananmen Incident, Falun Gong, and the Beijing Olympics

Since 1991, the Chinese government has issued a series of papers concerning human rights and related problems, as well as signing two formal treaties in 1997 and 1998 in an attempt to come to grips with the issues pertinent to the subject. This paper does not focus on the Chinese state; rather, it considers the meager scholarship that attempts to apply Hegel to contemporary China, and explores Chinese people’s pursuit of human rights in a Hegelian framework. By studying the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, Falun Gong, and the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it toes a middle‐ground between Western critics and scholars to illuminate how Chinese people’s pursuit of human rights has been informed by Western ideas as well as Confucianism and other Chinese philosophies. While this paper appropriates the Hegelian concept of right, it also relies on his dialectic view of human history to add to the existing criticisms of his warped, Orientalist view of Chinese society.

Vexing Resistance, Complicating Occupation: A Contrapuntal Reading of Sahar Khalifeh's Wild Thorns and David Grossman's The Smile of the Lamb

This article examines two novels representing the fifth year of Israeli occupation of the West Bank (1972)— Wild Thorns , written by (Palestinian) Sahar Khalifeh, and The Smile of the Lamb , written by (Israeli) David Grossman—testing the possibilities and limits of Edward Said's notion of contrapuntal reading in the Israeli/Palestinian context. While both novels address primarily their own nation, both bridle against the limits of nationalism. Wild Thorns dramatizes the diversity of struggle within Palestinian society to resist military occupation, complicating Orientalist views of Palestinian society. By contrast, The Smile of the Lamb examines the psychological and moral damage of occupation to both Palestinians and Israelis. In tracking the relationship between an Israeli soldier in moral crisis and an Arab outcast grieving the death of his son, Grossman's novel opens up the possibility of cross-national identification in ways that echo and extend Khalifeh's novel.

Review: <em>How NGOs React: Globalization and Education Reform in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Mongolia</em> by Iveta Silova and Gita Steiner-Khamsi

How NGOs React: Globalization and Educational Reform in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Mongolia by Iveta Silova and Gita Steiner- Khamsi. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2008. 303 pp. ISBN 978-1- In the field of International Education, connecting with the right people, individuals with funding and influence, is a categorical endeavor that How NGOs React does not take lightly. While a plethora of interesting articles make their home in this volume of edited works on Central Asian education reforms, the real magic appears in Iveta Silova and Gita Steiner-Khamsi’s savvy editorial choices. As they explicitly note in their introduction, “In order to secure a grant or loan, the ministries of education had first to learn to speak the language of international donors” (p. 14). If any Central Asian Department of Education needs pointers on crafting a message, How NGOs React should be the guidebook; through their deliberate choices, Silova and Steiner-Khamsi highlight the conceptual power of space, image, and ideology in framing projects to fit the predilections of conservative funding agencies. Published in 2008, How NGOs React marks a strategic departure from geographic positioning of earlier books on Central Asian Education. Whereas most editors (such as Stephen P. Heyneman and Alan J. DeYoung in their must- read book The Challenge of Education in Central Asia) show an indelible Soviet Urstoff in their characterizations, Silova and Steiner-Khamsi realign the boundaries to weight an Asian identity. In particular, with the prominent inclusion of Mongolia, a sparsely populated country that barely registers in other education texts, this identity challenge is largely solved. Though Mongolian culture itself felt nearly 70 years of Soviet hegemony before 1990, the Western perception of Mongolia goes much further back in history. In place of the “Iron Curtain,” Euro- American investors can conjure the glory of Genghis Khan’s imperial charge through China, India, and Eastern Europe. Steiner-Khamsi, North America’s foremost Mongolian education specialist, begins and ends the book with comparative discussions of Mongolian education. By relating Central Asian educational trends through the most exotic and geographically distant country to Russia, Silova and Steiner-Khamsi harness the Euro-American Orientalist view of Mongolia as an untamed, free nomadic space. While mapping Central Asian geography apart from associations with Soviet Socialism, they simultaneously add weight and distinctiveness to this region. While redrawing the map for Euro-American education funding agencies, How NGOs React reimagines the students of Central Asia. This book refuses to reify our expectations with snapshots of charming yet bucolic learners; the students in How NGOs React are refreshingly dapper and professional. Ensconced in a tasteful, corporate navy blue background, one large black and white photo

Hegel, the Tiananmen Incident and Falun Gong

AbstractThis paper explores Chinese people's pursuit of human rights through the Hegelian lenses of abstract rights and the master–slave dialectic. By juxtaposing the 1989 Tiananmen Incident and the Falun Gong movement, it illuminates how Chinese people's struggles for human rights have been informed by Confucianism and other Chinese philosophies, although they have also looked to the West for inspiration and endorsement. Moreover, Hegel's very own dialectic reassures us that Chinese people do not need to have an affirmative, conscious knowledge of 'rights' before they pursue them. While the student protests in 1989 were fuelled by a nationwide economic crisis, the Falun Gong movement was the result of an increasingly prosperous but spiritually blighted society. In both cases, the people, like slaves, struggled against their master, the Chinese government, for freedom and recognition so as to attain a full self-consciousness. Thus, this paper appropriates Hegelian concepts and his dialectical view of history to add to the existing criticisms of his Orientalist views, namely his belief that China is a stagnant nation and its people have no independent personality but only a servile consciousness.

Revisiting Bialik: A Radical Mizrahi Reading of the Jewish National Poet

In this essay I offer a radical Mizrahi reading of the poetry of the Ashkenazi Zionist poet Haim Nahman Bialik—that is, a reading that examines Jewish and Israeli history and culture through the radical Mizrahi discourse that has evolved in Israel during the past generation, as part of Mizrahi resistance to the cultural and social oppression of Mizrahim. Equipped with these critical lenses, I read Bialik's poems both in the context of their own time and in the Israeli context of my own life. I focus on three poems that I believe are central to his national poetry: “To the Bird” (“El Hatzipor”) from 1892, “A Small Missive” (“Igeret Ktana”) from 1893, and “City of the Killings” (“Be'ir Hahareiga”) from 1903. I also examine alongside these poems two of Bialik's lesser known lectures: “The Revival of the Sephardim” (“Tchiyat Hasefaradim”), which he gave to an audience of young Sephardim in Jerusalem in 1926, and “Eretz Yisrael,” (“The Land of Israel”), which he delivered to Jewish youths in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, 1929.In the course of the essay, I argue that by configuring Arab-Jews (Jews from the Arab world) and, with greater vigor, Palestinians, as those who live outside of history, Zionist historiography has enabled both the economic dispossession and cultural oppression of these groups, including their uprooting and relocation from one region to another. A close and retrospective reading of “poems of diaspora and redemption” written by Bialik and his contemporaries reveals the Orientalist and colonialist world view held by the Ashkenazi-Zionists. By speaking always of Sephardicness but not Jewish-Arabness, Bialik acts as a pioneer of the de-Arabization of Arab Jews and their culture, a trend that grew evermore deeply entrenched in Israel's official policy towards Mizrahi Jews. Indeed, it was Bialik—the institution and the literary symbol—who served three generations of Zionist educators devoted to writing a new Jewish history from which the Jews who lived in Arab and Islamic lands during the last few centuries were erased.

Political Islam in the Mediterranean: the view from democratization studies

Contemporary perceptions of, and responses to, the growth of political Islam on the southern shores of the Mediterranean are still heavily influenced by traditional orientalist views on ‘Islam’ and by realist notions of regional security. This situation contributes to the formation of predominantly state-centric responses to what is perceived to be a monolithic Islamist threat. The issues of democratization and democracy promotion are downplayed in the face of security concerns. When addressed, liberal-inspired views of democracy and civil society are nonetheless problematically deployed in a social and political context that does not duplicate well the conditions met in previous ‘waves’ of successful democratization elsewhere. The prospects for democratization are linked to a situation where moderate Islamist movements are expected to endorse liberal-democratic values – albeit reluctantly and by default – and where state-imposed constraints on political liberalization can only slow down the process of implementation of electoral democracy. Far too little attention is paid to the alternative forms of participation that are devised locally by Islamists, as well as to the relevance of standard electoral processes in the context of refined authoritarian systems.

Bartok in the Desert: Challenges to a European Conducting Research in North Africa in the Early Twentieth Century

Although B?la Bart?k is most often viewed as a composer whose music derived many of its features from his study of Eastern European folk elements, the composer also had a longtime fascination with the music of the Arab world. Notably, Bart?k's travels to the Biskra region of present-day Algeria in 1913 and his attendance at the Cairo Conference of Arab Folk Music in 1932 provided him with unique perspectives that greatly informed a number of his subsequent compositions. While his reputation as an ethnomusicologist engenders the thought that these trips were only due to his interest in folk music, the implications for North Africa as a target for colonization, a remnant of ancient civiliza tion, and a representative of the exotic other obfuscates Bart?k's true intentions. His interest in North Africa also brings into question whether he held an Orientalist view of the Near East. In this paper I will examine his travels throughout the Arabian desert as a comparative musicologist, the obstacles and controversies encountered during his research in this region, and his desire to understand the overlapping and displacement of domains of difference that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nation-ness, community interest or cultural value ... negotiated. Most beneficial to this study are the primary sources written by Bartok himself. His letters to various authorities, family members, and friends reveal many of his reasons for visiting North Africa as well as his thoughts and findings during these trips. A letter from Bart?k's first wife, Marta Ziegler, reveals pithy details about their success and misfor tune during their journeys in Algeria. Bart?k's findings from his trip to Biskra were published four years later in the Hungarian periodical Szimf?nia.5 So important was this that in 1920 a more comprehensive

Preface

Preface Leslie Choquette As the new editor of French Colonial History, I am pleased to present this collection of essays representing the broad scholarly interests of members of the French Colonial Historical Society. The volume consists largely of papers delivered at the 31st annual meeting of the Society in Wolfville, Nova Scotia; however, it also reflects the Society's new policy of allowing members to submit articles to the journal not previously presented at one of our conferences. We hope that this more flexible policy will benefit members who are ready to publish their research but unable to attend a particular conference. The 11 essays that follow are divided by region and arranged in approximately chronological order within each region. The four essays on New France, France's first empire in North America, range from Thomas Peace's linguistic study of seventeenth-century terms for Native Americans to the presentation of the archaeology of Fort St. Joseph in Michigan by José Brandão and Michael Nassaney. Benoît Grenier and Jan Noel both focus on social history—Grenier on the often harmonious relations between habitants and resident seigneurs, Noel on the widespread participation of women in the fur trade. Noel's paper, which calls for a reexamination of earlier interpretations of women in New France, including her own, argues that female economic participation was the rule in preindustrial societies, such that economically active women in New France were simply part of the norm. The next four essays explore France's nineteenth- and twentieth-century empire in North Africa from the standpoint of both intellectual and social history. Mourad Ali-Khodja acquaints us with a lesser-known Orientalist Tocqueville who championed the colonization of Algeria, while Phillip Naylor analyzes the impact of a century of colonialism on the formation of Algerian intellectual Malek Bennabi. Christelle Taraud, [End Page vii] winner of the 2004 Heggoy Prize for her book La prostitution coloniale : Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc (1830-1962), and Sara Kimble consider aspects of the condition of North African women between the World Wars. Kimble elucidates the often Orientalist views of French feminists with regard to their Muslim counterparts, and Taraud describes the coercive system for regulating indigenous prostitution established in colonial Casablanca. In the third section, Marie Pineau-Salaün examines the problem of republican schooling in the colonial context of the Pacific island of New Caledonia; in the last, Reine-Claude Grondin and Armelle Mabon look at colonial ideas and peoples as they circulated within the metropolis. Grondin's essay discusses the reception of colonialist discourse in a rural French province, the Limousin, and Mabon's considers the fate of the 70,000 French colonial soldiers who were taken prisoner during World War II. I would like to thank the former editors of French Colonial History, Robert DuPlessis and Patricia Galloway, for their advice and counsel. I can only hope to emulate the high standard that they have set. I am also grateful to the authors, to the members of the editorial board for their work as referees, and to the staff of Michigan State University Press for their consistent helpfulness, patience with a neophyte, and efficiency. Leslie Choquette Assumption College Copyright © 2006 Michigan State University Press

„Die beste und schönste Sprache der Welt”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeAbstractThis paper deals with one of many proposals in modern Japan to replace the Japanese language with another language. While most proposals were made in the Meiji period, Shiga Naoya, a cultural icon of the Taishō and Shōwa period, set forth his scheme to have Japanese replaced with French in 1946. In a short essay, translated in this present paper for the first time, Shiga reiterates ideological views about language and Japanese, which have their basis in orientalism. According to such beliefs, Japanese is an incomplete and deficient language which stands in the way of developing the Japanese nation. Shiga mixes these views with modern ideologies of linguistic nationalism, thus arriving at a hybrid view on Japanese. While his scheme of solving language problems by introducing a Western language to Japan seems absurd, his essay is extremely interesting with regard to the study of language ideology, as it includes two specific language ideologies connected to Japanese. It is concluded that these ideologies cannot be treated independently when discussing Shiga's proposal, since the more recent ideology of linguistic nationalism was developed in reaction to ideologies already existing at that time. Shiga, in short, mixes up the orientalist view on Japanese with modern linguistic nationalism and, in doing so, provides us with a key to unlock both ideologies at the same time.

Islamic jurisprudence and the role of the accused: a re-examination

This paper re-examines the Orientalist view that Islamic criminal justice operates without any constitutional protections for the individual. It takes the works of Noel Coulson as representative of the canon and subjects them to critical scrutiny. Rather than mimic Orientalist methods of analysis, the author integrates the views of a contemporary, but traditional Islamic scholar, and demonstrates that an accused receives similar, if not more, protection than in a secular, Western tradition.

The X-Files: Past and Present Portrayals of China's Alien 'Legal System'

In the last twenty years, China has embarked on unprecedented legal reforms. China's entrance into the WTO, its emergence as a major economic and political power, and its ongoing human rights abuses have all focused further attention on its legal system. Given the explosion of information about the legal system and the pace of change, Chinese legal scholars face a daunting challenge simply to obtain and present an accurate view of the system. But we face an even more daunting challenge in trying to analyze and conceptualize such changes. Reforms have undermined traditional understandings of China's legal system. Many old conceptual frameworks are obsolete or require major overhaul, and new categories and theories are desperately needed. In Part I of this Article, I examine the recent attempt of the prominent comparative law scholar Ugo Mattei to develop a new taxonomy that takes into consideration developments in the legal systems of China and other Asian countries in an effort to bring them into the mainstream of comparative law. While I applaud his motives and share his concerns about the need to bring Chinese legal studies into the mainstream of comparative law, I question his results. Mattei wishes to correct the Orientalist biases of prior taxonomies, but ends up imposing his own Orientalist views on Asian legal systems. In Part II of this Article, I discuss what seems to be a tendency in much foreign scholarship to portray China's legal system in excessively negative terms and to unduly dismiss developments and trends suggesting that China is moving toward some form of rule of law. I suggest that what is needed is a more balanced approach, informed by a broader historical and comparative perspective. Part III concludes with some observations about teaching and researching Chinese law.

Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (review)

Building on the work of such scholars as Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, Jarrod Hayes provides a fascinating look at the interplay of sexual and national identity in francophone North African literature. His study covers a broad range of authors including Tahar Djaout, Mohammed Dib, Kateb Yacine, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, and Albert Memmi. Hayes's work is primarily a study of the presence of "non-normative" sexualities in Maghrebian literature written in French and the use of these taboo identities to challenge the dominant sexual identities, heterosexual and male, in their claim to hegemony. He demonstrates that through their foregrounding of marginal sexualities, these writers successfully achieve twin goals. They are able to support the establishment of a positive national identity against the suppression of this identity by the former colonizing power and against Orientalist views of the Maghreb, especially confronting Western notions of "Oriental sex." Simultaneously, these images of the nation challenge the dominant form of nationalism, countering a monolithic and exclusive definition of the nation with a multifaceted inclusive one. Hayes demonstrates that the effect of this overt presentation of marginal sexualities not only undermines the dominance of Maghrebian male heterosexuality--thereby "queering" the nation, but also Orientalizes the West by reflecting Orientalist images imposed upon the Maghreb onto the sexual identities and practices of the West itself.