THE VANITY PROJECT OF LIBERAL ORIENTALISM.


In this superb piece  Warwick Powell looks at the blindness and inherently supremacist and patronising nature of the western 'intellectual' view of the east (and the rest of the non-western world). One point he doesn't spell out is that this is DEEPLY embedded in 'western' culture. We are weaned on it in a way that is so embedded that we can't see it. 


'Although Liberal Orientalists often criticise the West’s imperial past, they retain a normative confidence in liberal values as universally desirable. Liberalism is the virtuous and rationalist counterpoint to imperium, even when liberalism as an art and technology of governance anchored the violence of colonial government from Egypt through to India, and everywhere else in between. Indeed, Liberal Orientalism elevates the west’s epistemic and moral exceptionalism. The West becomes the yardstick by which all societies are measured, even when doing so leads to disappointment rather than triumphalism. This positions the West as the emotive centre of world history. It grieves, judges and laments the path not taken by others.......An adequate response to Liberal Orientalism must refuse its sentimentalism without denying the complexity of historical trauma. This means reasserting a materialist and dialectical reading of history. Such a reading recognises the necessity of rupture. Revolutions are not aesthetic violations but historical acts of negation, seeking to unmake oppressive pasts and forge new futures. Political transformation involves the mobilisation of ordinary people, whose subjectivity cannot be collapsed into elite loss. The agency of the masses cannot be sublimated to the vanities of elites. Last but not least, it recognises that liberalism is itself historically contingent. Western liberalism is neither the end of history nor a universal destiny. Au contraire, it is an historically specific formation with its own contradictions, exclusions and imperial entanglements.


                                                           

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