Columbia's Hysterical Arabist: Zainab Bahrani
- From: "DoD" <thecats@xxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2006 14:28:30 GMT
The Edith Porada Associate Professor of Archeology, Zainab Bahrani is the
author of two books, Women of Babylon (a feminist interpretation of Near
Eastern art), and a second work, The Graven Image: Representation in
Babylonia and Assyria on Mesopotamian art. With Mark van de Mieroop (the
former chair of MEALAC), with whom she has a close association, she has
translated a book on Mesopotamian history by the French scholar Jean Bottero
called Mesopotamia, Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods.
Van de Mieroop, incidentally, shares Bahrani's distaste for Israel (he has
signed the same petitions on divestment from Israel), and is apparently
convinced that a reasonable facsimile of the Gestapo is abroad in the land:
"I know that my phone is tapped, that e-mails are read, that mail is opened.
I have the sense of unease, the loss of privacy, and also the fear to speak
out, to write - will what I say tonight be held against me when I have to
appear in court."
Bahrani has been much in the news, having written a number of anguished, and
furious accounts of what she takes to have been gross negligence by the
Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Despite her bitterness, in May 2004
the State Department appointed Bahrani as a "Senior Consultant for Culture"
to the Coalition Provisional Authority, so as to help in the reconstruction
of the National Museum. She attended to this but for a few months before
returning to academia.
This study by necessity must quote Bahrani at great length, for it is
otherwise not possible to appreciate the repetitious, banal, suffocating
quality of her prose, the running-on of non-thought. The Graven Image goes
for more than 200 pages. Virtually every page overflows with "discourse" and
"colonial" and "postcolonial" as all-purpose lexical fillers. Her meaning is
so diffuse and obscure, and at the same time so obviously modish, that to
read her is an experience that cannot be conveyed by mere summary.
Early in The Graven Image Bahrani announces:
Although I often make use of the language of European criticism and
philosophy, it is important to stress that the theoretical base for this
study is neither simply Eastern nor Western, being dependent on the writings
of both Euro-American and Third World scholars. I would also argue that a
labeling of all postmodern theories in the academy as "Western" is
misleading and might even be defined as intellectual imperialism,
considering the groundbreaking work of numerous non-European contemporary
theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Jacques Derrida. (p. 10)
Having established postmodern theory as an authentic Third World product,
and defined any criticism as - shudder - imperialism. But then in
distinction to her previous statement, Bahrani appears to state that she has
gained access to ancient mysteries denied to others:
While I discuss the problematic of narrating the past and interpreting the
ancient texts and images, for me, the ancient record itself remains the
place to which I return for knowledge of the past. This return to the
ancient texts and images is important because in arguing against the Western
traditions' representations of Mesopotamia, I base my theory on the
Assyrio-Babylonian textual and archeological record. (p. 10)
What is it to be? "Non-European contemporary theorists" or the
"Assyrio-Babylonian textual and archeological record?" Both, of course,
since her project has higher goals:
Ancient history and archeology continue to be areas of scholarship that are
inseparable from geopolitical issues, even if these issues are not the same
as the ones that had been of foremost concern to Fanon. Numerous
preconceptions regarding the Middle East and Middle Eastern antiquity have
gone into the construction of Mesopotamia, and Orientalism continues to
operate with its stereotypes of violence, fanaticism, despotism, sloth, and
hypersexuality. (p. 11)
Her mission is nothing less than to undo this terribly travesty:
I do hope to dismantle a fabricated conception of this Mesopotamia. .mine is
a reclaiming of that past, not in the sense of nationalist historical
identity, however, but as a discursive territory. There are no studies of
Near Eastern antiquity written from a position outside the European
tradition. Those written in the Middle East, for the most part, repeat
Western paradigms because the field of Near Eastern archeology is a European
field of knowledge, instituted into the Middle East and North Africa under
colonial rule. (p. 14):
Thus situated, she will liberate Mesopotamia past and present, and the
discipline of art history. The heroes and villain are plain to see:
A main thesis of this book is that since the discipline of art history
developed during the period of European expansion, it came to rely upon, as
well as be utilized by, the imperialist endeavor. Consequently aesthetic
discourse today continues to be a site for the play of alterity. In other
words, I maintain that the epistemology of separation and difference of
Western/non-Western art and aesthetics was originally necessary for the
functioning of the discipline, for a notion of a telos in the civilized
West, and for building the borders of Western self against barbaric other. I
would like to point out here that in using the term West I mean to refer to
a Eurocentric identity created by late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century
Western European discourse. (p. 16)
And of course, imperialist art history played a key role in the imperial
subjugation of the world:
A fundamental concept of colonial discourse analysis is that the business of
"knowing" other people was a major tool in underpinning imperial domination
(Said 1978: 22). Knowing subordinate cultures and representing them through
that knowledge, and subsequent exporting to them that knowledge about their
subordinate position, was the civilizing mission of imperialism (p. 20)
Alas, without the imperialism and art history Bahrani so palpably abhors,
her own mission would be impossible. The recovery of the art, and the
civilizations, of the ancient Near East, is the story of Europeans. It was
they who came, dug, discovered, carefully retrieved, catalogued, and studied
these artifacts. It was not the local Muslims, but Europeans, who
appreciated the civilization of Assyria and Babylon. Sir Austen Henry Layard
and Sir Leonard Woolley, Howard Carter, at Nineveh, and at Ur, respectively,
come immediately to mind. Egyptology was a product not of Egyptians but of
Europeans: the Frenchman Champollion, the German Lepsius, hundreds of
others. The meticulous study of the civilizations of Mesopotamia by such
scholars as Henri Frankfort, Sabatino Moscati, and A. Leo Oppenheim who
produced indispensable scholarly works, or those who studied Cuneiform, or
those who gathered and preserved smaller artifacts, were Europeans or
Americans.
Perhaps Bahrani, like Said before her, simply cannot believe that there is
such a thing as disinterested scholarship prompted by curiosity. If Layard
and Woolley and Champollion and Lepsius, are not examples of disinterested
study of the past, it is hard to know what would so qualify. They were not
part of any "colonial" or "postcolonial" venture. They were not promoting
imperialism. They were simply studying the past -- because it interested
them, and because they could. Others studied Stonehenge, or collected
arrowheads, or sat as students of the stars, and for the same reasons.
Again and again, Bahrani gives us the Saidian line:
In the first part of this book, I argued that an awareness of the cultural
project of imperialism is vital for writing a post-Orientalist history of
Mesopotamia or of the Near Eastern world. I further insisted that a
post-colonial historiography can be politically meaningful only if it
considers the discourse of the present in light of the modes of knowing or
structures of reference established in the period of colonialism. (p. 208)
This is nonsense on stilts. What "colonialist" presence was there in Iraq
when Layard first began his Assyriological spadework, and Iraq was still
part of the Ottoman Empire? Mesopotamia was ruled by the Ottoman Turks. The
British drove out the Turks and liberated the Arabs, and remained in Iraq
for precisely 12 years - from 1920 to 1932. Then they left. During World War
II, as part of the theatre of war, a small British contingent returned to
deprive the Nazis - who had many admirers in Iraq - of Iraqi oil. Was that
the "colonialism" that so disturbingly informs so much of The Graven Image?
Actually, this book does what it set out to, for it does manage to break
away from all Eurocentric approaches to discourses of subalternity, or even
of meta-alterity, and comes so subversively close in its disjunctive
interrogation of the counter or anti-mimesis which is inherently essential
to Mesopotamian thought, for as a native of Baghdad and hence a
non-European, Bahrani is certainly perfectly placed to perform such a
mission of interrogating all postcolonialist as well as narrativised
specificity, but obviously not, at the same time, either poststructuralist
or post-postmodern universalism, with its customary relativised discourse
analysis which seldom lends itself to anticipatory prolepsis, but on the
other hand her critique is obviously deeply rooted in Western thought with
its alien constructions of identity that give rise to post-essentialism
which, in a larger sense, serve merely to violate all the strategic
critiques of hegemonic historiographical constructions of essences, whether
of the Orient or of scholars who deny the self-referentiality of all
postcolonialist essentializing.
I hope that is clear.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20711
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