Crisis at Columbia: Columbia's Hysterical Arabist, Zainab Bahrani
- From: "Mike" <yard22192@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 30 Dec 2005 16:03:16 -0800
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? 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.
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.
.
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