Re: Crisis at Columbia: Columbia's Hysterical Arabist, Zainab Bahrani


"Mike" <yard22192@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1135980358.598023.218330@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Crisis at Columbia: Columbia's Hysterical Arabist, Zainab Bahrani
> by Hugh Fitzgerald
> FrontPage Magazine
> January 3, 2006
> http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Readarticle.asp?id=20711
> http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2352
>
> 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?
So was Middle East. Throughout history Egypt was conquered dozen times, that
did not stop Egypt from being a vast trove of knowledge and art! Just
because Russians conquered Palestine in 1948, that does not mean that
Palestinian culture and art ahs disappeared.

Mesopotamia was ruled by the Ottoman
> Turks. The British drove out the Turks and liberated the Arabs,
*** yes, Arabs danced in the streets and gave candy to the British!

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.
>
> Hugh Fitzgerald wrote this piece for Campus Watch, a project of the
> Middle East Forum, which is designed to critique and improve Middle
> East Studies at North American colleges and universities. It is part of
> a series of analysis addressing Columbia University's Middle East
> Studies faculty. We invite you to read Fitzgerald's introductory essay,
> and the entries in alphabetical order.
>


.