Re-Orientalism and Indian writing in English
Ana Cristina Mendes
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AI-generated Abstract
The paper explores the concept of re-orientalism in Indian writing in English, addressing how postcolonial legacies continue to influence self-definition in the East by reinforcing the East-West dichotomy. Lau and Dwivedi analyze literary representations of India, focusing on case studies that illustrate various dimensions of re-orientalism, such as the unreliable narrator and commodification within the Western publishing industry. The work aims to extend the discourse on re-orientalism and evaluate its thematic and aesthetic impact on contemporary Indian literature.
Key takeaways
- While Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) identified how the west represented the east as an alter ego, keeping east and west in sharp dichotomy, re-orientalism theory investigates how current processes of self-definition in the east are inexorably coloured by postcolonial legacies and continue to reach to the west ideologically and otherwise, thereby perpetrating the east-west dichotomy and reinforcing orientalism rather than deconstructing it.
- The introduction sets the tone for the four chapters that follow, each of which corresponds to a specific case study of re-orientalism at work: the narrative strategy of the unreliable narrator, reverse orientalism and the production of the "un-Indian Indian", the focus on metropolitan topographies as fertile ground for re-orientalism, and the commodification of Indian writing in English within the western publishing industry.
- By situating the desires and positions of a global readership, as well as the context and production of IWE, and by questioning how Indian writers negotiate a global marketplace that remains orientalized, Lau and Dwivedi's Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English will surely represent essential reading for all concerned with the debates surrounding selfrepresentation in this fraught area.
