As my subtitle suggests, I’ve been ruminating on the persistent legacy and establishment of the “Other,” in the West, as a peculiar, sinister heirloom we have not managed to modernize, despite our collective ‘will’ to (post)modern ourselves. In Timothy Mitchell’s “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” we see how the West centered itself through an essentialist self-vision that located all non-Westerners as outsiders, and silenced those through negation/absence. This binary definition was most clearly experienced through the Western obsession with exhibitions and spectacles, which Mitchell reads/constructs through a re-reading of Middle Eastern visitors’ travelouges.

I found myself reentering a space of anger reading Mitchell’s re-reading. The Middle Easterners repeatedly mentioned the “curiosity” of the Europeans, and this fetishizing and objectifying cloaked in curiosity is still present and hidden through contemporary experiences of the non-West. Today it often takes the form of appropriation, or worst, full negation of those outside of the hegemony center.

We also trace this through Malek Alloula’s “From The Colonial Harem;” however, Alloula places before us the double-jeopardy women of color face in front of the Western male. To commence his tracing of the colonist gaze, Alloula asks that we look no further than the travel postcards of the early 20th century to observe the propagation, negation, and sexualization of the colored woman. If you are like me, you have never considered the postcard as a place of colonialism, racism, and xenophobia, but now, I cannot unsee it.

What I find most alarming is the systematic centering of the Western male and his instinctual nature to possess, exert power, and negate those unlike himself. Most often, it is seen as a negation, a denial of existence or periphery acknowledgment. The Algerian women are violated three times at the edict of the frustrated colonial—first by his sexualizing gaze, which is rejected by her veil, desire, and place; second, by his camera trained upon her private and most intimate self veiled from view; and third, by the receivers of the postcard, whom will adapt a colonist, other rendering of herself.

I’m thinking about Okqui Enwezor’s essay “Contemporary Art in Permanent Transition,” and in particular his questioning of the contemporary curator who needs the ability to express and exhibit his intellectual ability and agency in a field where culture and productions, or works (of art) are not to inhabit the same space. The focus of what Enwezor calls “institutional commentary” (as opposed to “generalist or speculative commentary,” which is focused on novelty and materialistic objectification like entertainment and fashion) is positioned between academic and museological works that promote the scientific and academic over the self-identifying, or cultural/multi-cultural.

This position is one that wholly negates and silences the art and voice found predominately in the non-Western; but I argue, this is only because of the “Other” inheritance of the West, which positions itself at the center, and locates the non-Western as a marginal production of identity. To the West, the works of the non-Western other is not ‘pure’ art.

Enwezor directs us to this in his critique of Tate Modern museum’s treatment of Modernism. Despite their “double-talk” concerning the intersection of European and African cultures during the early 20th century and the West’s stereotyping and appropriation of African culture, the curators still reduced African art to colonial expressions of nakedness  (as opposed to the bourgeois nudity) and artistic negation.

Enwezor is unable to answer his question concerning the curator’s dilemma of intellectual agency, though he does urge us to solidify postcolonial history and theory to accurately understand art history and its contributing practices. Might I add, that we turn to Suzanne Preston Blier’s “Vodun Art, Social History and the Slave Trade” where she defines art as the expression of the unexplicable. Blier explains that bocio subverts and critiques expressions of art and power. Instead of embracing the ideas of the elite, bocio arts and aesthetics privileges the aesthetics of the commoner, and embraces an antithetical, uncultured aesthetic. 

In the same way bocio subverts the privileged and gives voice to the disenfranchised, Finbarr Barry Flood, challenges are understanding of Islamic Iconoclasm in “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm and the Museum.” Flood deconstructs the idea and stereotype of the radical Islamic Iconoclast, and traces the historic contradictions within Islamic periods regarding Iconoclasm, and draws key distinctions between Iconoclasm acts.

After reading Flood’s essay, especially in the context of Mitchell’s, Enwezor’s, and Blier’s, I find myself challenged in how I view acts I’ve accepted at face value as extreme vandalism. I do not condone their acts; yet, I view their acts as subverting structures of power and hegemony. If nothing else, I am no longer able to accept the face value of narratives established to protect and support structures and positions of power and traditional “Othering.”  

Finally, a movement towards deconstrucalism is physically and literary evident in Eyal’s Weizman’s survey of urban war in his article, “Urban Warfare: Walking Through Walls.” Weizman traces and explicates the Israeli military manoeuvre, which physically deconstructed and subverted the urban city by moving through walls of domestic living within an urban city. As I read and visualized the movement and violent nature of war strategy Weizman outlined, I found myself at odds with the military’s practice. The manoeuvre claimed to deconstruct the physical space, and highlighted how this deconstruction drew its ideation from deconstructionist theories, but I could not stop thinking about the people who inhabit these physical spaces. The military refer to these spaces as “domestic,” and I instantly read that as spaces women and children will inhabit. I struggle with the idea of the military using critical theory to disrupt and harm the spaces women and children inhabit. I struggled most to understand and place this essay in conversation with the rest. Insinctually, I begun to read the article from a Womanist/Feminist lens that sought to deconstruct their argument and the joining of war strategy with critical theory. There is something uncanny and unsettling situated between the juxatoposition of those two practices for me.

This week’s reading stretched and expanded my understanding of colonial theory, by giving me opportunity to see how colonial theory is carried out in praxis.