A spectre haunts Western relations with china the spectre of

maoism. All the powers of the old world have entered into an
unholy alliance to kill this demon that died long ago, and yet it
still haunts us.
Mao Zedongs death in 1976 marked the end of the cultural revolution
in China. The Chinese political scrambled to disband the tenants of the
past proclaiming the Cultural Revolution was a catastrophe. Chinese
president Deng Xiaoping initiated liberal market reforms to distance
China from the outdated political infrastructure of Maoism. This marked
Chinas descent into the neoliberal order, and yet from the Asia pivot
to the WTO the US still challenges china as a nation in opposition to its
neoliberal ideology
Todays resolution builds itself upon a notion to ascribe static meaning
to China however, this conception of our relation to china is
plagued by the specter of Maoism that haunts Chinese politics
while also plaguing western representation of Chinese political
action rooted Maoist history translates into false ideologies
about modern Chinese governance and creates a perceived
misunderstanding of formal Chinese politics
Clinton 13. Maggie Clinton book analysist at Ohio State University. China and Orientalism: Western
Knowledge Production and the P.R.C.(https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/china-orientalism/)
There is no doubt that the Great Leap Famine in China more than half a century ago was the worst man-made
calamity of modern times, proclaims James C. Scott in a recent issue of the London Review of Books.[ 1 ] Given
modernitys destructive achievements and the fact that ranking them is necessarily subjective, Scotts confidence
that the post-Great Leap famine takes pride of place readily invites disagreement. Yet the compulsion to make a

Western Knowledge
Production and the P.R.C., is symptomatic of a Sinological-orientalist power dynamic
that continues to inform Western representations of China and its past. Taking as his
claim such as Scotts at all, Daniel F. Vukovich argues in China and Orientalism:

point of departure Edward Saids well-known formulation of the East as a discursively constituted space of alterity

China Studies has persistently demonized

Maoist China as the totalitarian other of an idealized liberal, democratic
West and coded post-Mao China as fitfully and imperfectly becoming-thesame. As Vukovich emphasizes, characterizations of post-Mao China as slowly exiting what Dipesh Chakrabarty
and lack, Vukovich traces the ways in which

has called the waiting room of history have been spurred by the global rise of neoliberalism and Chinas real

Within our neoliberal present, assertions such as

Scotts about the post-Great Leap famine purport to reveal the truth of the Maoist
revolution as a whole, signaling why the revolution must be discarded and
disavowed if China is ever to become fully normal. Vukovichs book astutely engages with
subsumption within a capitalist world order (3).

recent Western representations of Chinas past and present. The books seven chapters analyze ways in which the
China field, which Vukovich understands in its broadest sense as knowledge about China produced outside of

China, has yet to adequately decolonize its categories of understanding or frames

of analysis (6). Taking Sinological-orientalism to be visible in its system of dispersion (Foucaults term for
regularities discernible among apparently discontinuous statements, texts, and objects), Vukovich parses
scholarship and journalism about the Great Leap Forward and the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, academic
reception of Chinese feature films, a novel by Don DeLillo, and the China reference ubiquitous in much

contemporary orientalist
discourse concerning China, rather than maintaining Chinas essential difference,
now casts the polity as increasingly similar to an idealized West. This similarity,
however, remains structured by a hierarchical difference which maintains the
positional superiority of both the inquisitor and the West itself (2-3). Sinologicalorientalism concomitantly denigrates Maoism as having diverted China
from a normal development path and treats it as a ghost haunting Chinas
present which must be exorcised if normalcy (i.e., sameness with the liberal, capitalist,
democratic West) is to be achieved. This not only disregards the Maoist periods social
welfare achievements and its committed anti-colonialism, it also presumes that the
Chinese have approached the end of history (to which the West has already arrived) and must no
longer entertain any alternative. Ultimately, Vukovichs book sounds a welcome call to take Maoist China
seriously as, paraphrasing Zhang Xudong, an irreducibly complex world of life,
and reminds those who write about Chinas present and past to critically reflect on
the historicity and politics of their own representations (117). Chapter 1, Sinological
contemporary theory (126). The books well-demonstrated main argument is that

Orientalism Now, addresses the historical emergence and general contours of the discourse of becoming-thesame. Chapter 2, Uncivil Society, or, China and Tiananmen, 1989 argues that rubrics deployed by China
watchers to interpret the 1989 demonstrations have functioned to maintain the positional superiority of the West
by casting participants as inadequately conforming to liberal democratic norms. Chapter 3, Maoist Discourse and

scholars have failed to take Maoism seriously on its

own terms. The following chapter, Accounting for the Great Leap Forward, picks up this thread by assessing
its Demonization examines ways in which

how recent writing on the post-Great Leap famine has trumpeted questionably-derived death tolls at the expense of
developing a rigorous methodology to explain how the Leappresented here as a benignly intended strategy for
egalitarian rural development in an impoverished, decolonizing countryultimately resulted in catastrophe. Chapter
5, DeLillo, Warhol, and the Specter of Mao, traces the circulation of truisms about Maoism through Don DeLillos
novel Mao II, while chapter 6, Screening Sinology, looks at how Chinese films of the 1980s and 1990s are
frequently interpreted as transparent windows on Chinese reality and scoured for anti-CCP positions. Finally,
chapter 7, The China-reference and Orientalism in the Global Economy, considers how contemporary theorists,
including Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Giorgio Agamben, feel compelled to reference China without the
corresponding intent to actually say something insightful or even thoughtful or accurate about China, but to help
prove the truth of said theorists theoretical and political claims (128). While readers may bristle at Vukovichs
acerbic tone, it need not distract from the books overarching points. Particularly compelling is Vukovichs point

the Maoist revolution stood at the intersection of the Cold War and
decolonization that anti-communist interpretive frameworks reformulated rather
than supplanted colonialist discourse, and that these frameworks are still
deployed due to continued existence of the Communist Party-state (whatever
that,

its stance on capitalism). Drawing from an illuminating 1988 essay by William Pietz on classic statements of
totalitarianism and its alleged non-Western roots (George Kennans oriental mind, etc.), Vukovich addresses how
the concept of totalitarianism incorporated older notions of oriental despotism (20-23). This concept rears its head
in scholarship about Chinese Communist court politics, the ostensibly feudal behavior of student demonstrators in
1989, and in the astonishing regularity with which mass revolutionary action is reduced to a game of follow-theleader. Vukovich retorts that totalitarianism necessarily assumes a striking lack of human agency on the part of
hundreds of millions of brainwashed Chinese under Mao. As if all Chinese said and did whatever they were told to
do; as if there were a massive uniformity of experience across so much diverse, complex social space; as if there
were such an oriental surfeit of power that this was even possible. (23) Vukovich also insightfully addresses how a
racialized concept of totalitarianism informs the chronologically confused depiction of Maoism in DeLillos novel Mao
II, as well as efforts to equate Maoism with fundamentalist Islam (50-51). Such gestures not only conflate radically
opposed political agendas but also unreflexively conjure the specter of non-white subjects collectively haunting an
imperiled West. Against such ahistorical modes of inquiry, Vukovich proposes that we at the very least begin by
taking Maoist categories of self-understanding seriouslyfor instance, by recognizing the salience of the two-line
struggleand by remaining open to the prospect that the society under investigation can and will challenge our a
priori assumptions, conclusions, and discourse (3, 107-108). The book is at its strongest when it reads sources and

phenomena against Sinological-orientalist grains. For instance, in chapter two Vukovich offers a brilliant
interpretation of the poetry that adorned worker placards during the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. Rather than
attempting to see in the protests the emergence of civil societya formation and concept Vukovich finds wanting
everywhere in the worldhe invites us to reflect on the significance of working class participation and how workers
themselves framed their own actions. Their expressed desire to expel the dictators should not be seen as
anachronistic in 1989 but as a very urgent response to an increasingly ignoble existence that belied the very idea
of civil society (39). In chapter four, Vukovich suggests ways of understanding the famine that followed the Great
Leap Forward that neither inflate Maos role nor rely on problematic accounting methods to reach an outsized death
toll. He instead helpfully points us to scholarship by Carl Riskin, Utsa Patnaik, and others who have located the roots
of the famine in ill-coordinated planning and the too-rapid eclipse of extant market structures. Equally insightful are
the readings in chapter six of the films To Live, Yellow Earth, and In the Heat of the Sun, which caution against
rushing to code [such] films as either for or against the government and/or Maoism as well as the assumption that
to be good they must be subversive' (119). Although Vukovich circumscribes his study to the Maoist period and
after, China and Orientalism would have benefited from a deeper inquiry into the historical roots of the trope of
Chinas becoming-the-same. While he convincingly argues that this trope has become dominant within our
neoliberal, post-Cold War present, it is also the case that ideas about Chinas prospective homogenization with the
West have had a strong and enduring place in U.S. discourse, arguably more explicitly than in the French civilizing
mission briefly mentioned in the book (5). This idea was at the core of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century American
missionary enterprise (that the heathen Chinese could eventually, with proper white-Christian guidance, become
modern, rational, capitalist subjects). It was also a notion deftly promoted at midcentury to a U.S. audience by
Guomindang spokespeople such as Soong May-ling, who found an eager mouthpiece in Henry Luces Time-Life
empire. Moreover, becoming-the-same was also at the core of postwar modernization theory, with its denial of
coevalness, explicit anti-communism, and expectation that, given proper conditions, recently decolonized
populations could one day catch up with the First World. Though Vukovich raises this latter point, he might have
more directly addressed the fact that becoming-sameness appeared during the Cold War and well before, and how
we should account for the dominance of this trope at different points in time. Finally, even though Vukovich does
not confine his study to American scholarship or cultural production, since many of his examples are drawn from the
U.S. context his book could have benefited from a more substantive engagement with 9extant literature on
American orientalism, including works by Christina Klein, Karen Leong, and Mari Yoshihara. This would not only have
created a welcome bridge between China Studies and American/Asian-American Studies, but would have
illuminated links within Sinological-orientalisms system of dispersionsuch as the popular-cultural mediations

These issues aside, China and

Orientalism constitutes a challenging and illuminating book that will hopefully be
read and discussed widely.
between Don DeLillo and academic writing about Maoism.

The constant need to ascribe static identity to the Chinese

political locks western representation of China as a neverending political threat western policy makers justify their
decision making through an apparition of Chinas past
justifying Sino logical orientalist violence through a otherising
lens
Daniel Vukovich 12, Teaches critical and cultural theory as well as postcolonial
and China studies at Hong Kong University, Postcolonial Politics, China and
Orientalism Western knowledge production and the P.R.C.,
https://www.academia.edu/604154/China_and_Orientalism_Western_Knowledge_Pro
duction_and_the_P.R.C
But still it is impossible to not know the differences between for example
the P.R.C. of Maos time or of today and the China of certain, most
Western minds. This remains true even if the China field and
intellectualpolitical culture refuse to dwell on the matter, or refuse to
begin a debate on their writing of the Other. The production and
preservation of dense, diverse Chinese space may in the end be the largest or
most enduring contribution of Maoism and the long revolution. Beyond the

modernization and industrialization, beyond the political, cultural, and ideological

legacies, ideals, and discourses, and beyond the residua of the attempts at the
socialist transition and permanent revo-lution. This is admittedly abstract, and we
do not want to over-state the case or deny the longue dure of Chinese cultures,
specificities, and social forms. But there can be no denying that the event of
1949 happened, that the P.R.C. devel-oped, modernized, and still moves
forward under a different mode of production and social formation than
that of the capitalist West and their forms of thought . The best readers of
the Maoist trajectory have always understood that it was, perhaps most
fundamentally, an attempt to preserve or cancel and preserve, i.e. sublate a
very old, very big, and diverse nationalcivilizational space in the face of global
onslaughts under the name of capitalism, semi-colonialism, and imperialism. This in
addition to, even through its Marxist egalitarianism, passion for the masses and
class justice, and respect for farmers and the rural generally. In so far as it was
successful in this production and preservation of space, of non-capitalist and nonoccidentalist/colonial space, it made an undeniable con-tribution to China
and to difference, but also to the critique of orientalism, imperialism,
and capitalist modernity. It also reminds us that these last are to adopt Said one
more time alterable by intention. 39

Derrida says Haunting is historical but is not dated.

Meaning the apparition of Maoism can be seen in the political
influencing policy making decisions Maoism is an unseen
point of history that causes a deferral of reality. This creates a
blurred line of western discourse reshaping the true intent
of US policy.
By posing the non western other as a threat to be
constructed through subjective masks of perception- the
disarticulated lens of politics perpetuates a never ending cycle
of colonialist and imperialist violence.
Anand 7 Dibyesh, Western Colonial Representations of the Other: The Case of
Exotica Tibet, New Political Science Vol 29 Iss 1 2007, T&F
the issue of the representation of natives was often
considered as belonging to the realm of scientific objective ethnography , journalistic
Within the context of European imperialism,

commentaries, or fiction.2 A clear boundary was said to exist between fiction and non-fiction writing. It was
presumed that, unlike fiction, non-fiction writing such as literary and popular journalism, exploration and travel
writings, memoirs of colonial officials, and so on is unmediated by the consciously aesthetic requirements of

However, as argued by scholars from

fields as diverse as postcolonial studies,4 anthropology,5 and international relations,6 such views are no
longer tenable. Starting with Said,7 the enterprise of postcolonial theory has unpacked the
notion of neutral academic expertise and highlighted how Western knowledge
and representations of the non-Western world are neither innocent nor based on
some pre-existing reality, but implicated in the West's will to power, and its
imaginative literature.3 Emphasis was on the recording of observed facts.

imperial adventures. The image of a scientific, apolitical, disinterested,

knowledge-seeking gentleman braving all odds to study non-Western cultures has been
revealed as hollow. For instance, Colin Mackenzie, the first surveyor general of Madras in India, was clear
about his necessary complicity in the brute realities of colonial power. He conflated the role of the soldier and the
scientist and wrote: That science may derive assistance, and knowledge be diffused, in the leisure moments of
[military] camps and voyages, is no new discovery; but I am also desirous of proving that, in the vacant moments
of an Indian sojourn and campaign in particular such collected observations may be found useful, at least in
directing the observation of those more highly gifted to matters of utility, if not to record facts of importance to

The mask of objectivity in the colonial discourse hid relations

of inequality and domination. Fiction as well as non-fiction writings were permeated with
various strategies of representation. These were not epiphenomenal but central to
the ways in which the Other was sought to be known. What Rana Kabbani points out
philosophy and science.8

about travel writing holds true for non-fictional writings in general: during imperialism, it ultimately produced a
communal image of the East, which sustained a political structure and was sustained by it.9 Various forms of
representing the non-Westvisual (films, television, photographs, paintings, advertisements, and so on) as well as
textual (such as fiction, travelogue, journalism, ethnography, and anthropology)were

closely linked to

the production of imperial encounters. Asymmetry of productive power is a common trait

shared by these encounters. The contemporary neocolonial world too bears witness to the unequal and uneven
forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social within the modern world order.10 It
is not only the represented (here the colonized, the third world, the South) who are subjects of and subjected to the
process; even the representer (the colonizer, the first world, the West) is constructed by representational practices.
This in no way implies similar experiences for the colonizer and the colonized (the representer and the
represented). It only indicates that though everyone is subjected to representational practices, the impact differs
according to the existing power relations. To illustrate this point, while both the West and Tibetans are subjects of
Exotica Tibet, and the latter are not mere victims but exercise their agency through creative negotiations, the West
does not have to construct its identity according to the perception of Tibetans. Westerners exoticize Tibet, and in
turn, Tibetans exoticize the West. But while Western exoticization has a defining productive impact on Tibetan
identity discourse,11 the same cannot be said of Tibetan exoticization of the West. This reflects the asymmetry in
their power relations. A concentration on Western representations does not deny the fact that representational
practices were prevalent in non-Western societies too. In fact, historically, all cultures and civilizations have had
their own particular representational practices for perceiving those they considered as Other. Butand this is a
crucial qualificationit

was only with modern European imperialism that the capacity to

convert these representations into truth on a systematic and mass scale emerged.
What makes such representational practices distinctly modern is their productive capacity. Production of
knowledge about the Other through representations goes hand in hand with the
construction, articulation, and affirmation of differences between the Self and Other,
which in turn feeds into the identity politics amongst the representer as well as the
represented. The practices of essentializing and stereotyping the Other underlie different strategies of Western
representations. Essentialism is the notion that some core meaning or identity is determinate and not subject to
interpretation. Ronald Inden writes that essentialist ways of seeing tend to ignore the intricacies of agency
pertinent to the flux and development of any social system.12 In colonial context, we find essentialism in the
reduction of the indigenous people to an essential idea of what it means to be nativesay, Africans as singing
dancingfighting, Chinese as duplicitous, Arabs as cruel and oppressors of women, Tibetans as religious, and so on.
Imperialism drew its strength from representations of natives as quintessentially lazy, ignorant, deceitful, passive,
incapable of self-governing, and the native rulers as corrupt and despotic. Therefore, it should come as no surprise
that the British officials involved during the 19031904 invasion of Tibet saw it as something welcomed by
ordinary Tibetans seeking deliverance from their Chinese and monastic overlords. Captain Cecil Rawling in a
military report in 1905 wrote: It seems to be the general wish of the inhabitants of that country (Tibet) that they
should come under British administration.13 Curiously, Alistair Lamb's own assessment that when dealing with
the primitive peoples of Central Asia, the problem often was not how to expand one's power but how to prevent its

imperial expansion on the victims

is made possible by their essentialist representations as requiring
paternal imperialisma mix of iron fist and velvet glove. A stereotype is a one-sided
indefinite expansion14 too puts the onus of responsibility for
themselves. This

description of a group/culture resulting from the collapsing of complex differences into a simple cardboard cutout, seeing people as pre-set image and more of a formula than a human being.15 It reduces people to a few
simple characteristics, which are then represented as fixed by nature. Stereotyping reduces, essentialises,
naturalises and fixes difference.16 Stereotypes function as a marker between norm and deviancy, between us

stereotypical images of the Orient's separatenessits eccentricity,

its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleabilityha ve been part of
Western discursive practices for a long time.17 Stereotyping flourished to justify
imperialism as a civilizing missionthe restless, honest, active, exploratory, masculine,
and them. As Said argues,

enlightened, modern spirit of the white man stood in contrast to the laziness, deceit, passivity, fatalism,
femininity, backwardness, and traditional spiritlessness of the natives. For example, Captain John Noel's films
Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and The Epic of Everest (1924) developed the contrast between the extroverted,
aggressive, and manly British climbers with the introverted, passive, and squalid but mystical Tibetans.18
Stereotyping is a simplification not because it is a false representation of a given reality but because it is an
arrested, fixated form of representation that denies the play of difference. Let me illustrate this with an example
from the story of the first two men to reach Mount EverestTenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. Reaching the
summit, Tenzing Norgay says he felt the warm presence of the mountain, buried an offering to the gods, and said in
prayer: I am grateful, Chomolungma; Hillary took photographs to survey the area, urinated on the summit, and
later told one of the other climbers, George Lowe: Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.19 This difference in
attitude may be due to cultural factors. But to interpret humility as passivity and fix the identity of Tenzing Norgay
(read as representative of sherpas and other natives) as essentially passive in contrast to adventurous, scientific
Hillary (read as white man) leads to a reified and fixated form of representation (excluding those who do not fit in
the image). Stereotyping is not about expressing cultural difference, but fixing it in a pre-given socio-cultural milieu

Stereotyping served imperialism at both representational

and psychic levelssupporting the idea of paternal domination and acting as a kind
of perceptual blinder protecting the colonizers from discomforting consciousness of
either poverty or guilt.20 It allowed the participants in the massacre of Tibetans at Guru (March 31, 1904)
with extreme power differentials.

that took place during the British invasion of Tibet to blame it on the crass stupidity and childishness of the Tibetan
general,21 malevolent monks, superstitious Tibetan soldierseveryone except themselves. We must liberate the
ordinary natives from their brutal leadersthis sentiment can be seen in Colonel Francis Younghusband's account of
the 19031904 expedition to Tibet where after criticizing Tibetans for being crafty, immoral, over-religious, dirty,
and lazy, he says there are in them latent potentialities for good, which only await the right touch to bring them
into being.22 We may recall Napoleon's proclamation in 1798 upon entering Egypt: Peoples of Egypt, you will be
told that I have come to destroy your religion; do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights, to
punish the usurpers, and that I respect more than the Mamluks God, His Prophet, and the Quran.23 Though in
everyday conversation we tend to use stereotype only for negative images, stereotyping has within it dualism and
ambivalence.24 As Michael Hunt in his study of hierarchy of race and American foreign policy points out, the
Americans created for Orientals two distinctly different images: a positive one, appropriate for happy times when
paternalism and benevolence were in season, and a negative one, suited to those tense periods when abuse or
aggrandizement became the order of the day.25 While sometimes a positive stereotype may be politically and
socially helpful for a group, in the long run it reifies and imprisons the represented subjects in their own arrested
image. This problem can be seen most clearly in the case of Tibetans who seem to be prisoners of their stereotyped
images. Alluding to the real effects of the language of stereotype about Tibet, Donald Lopez points out that it not
only creates knowledge about Tibet, in many ways it creates Tibet, a Tibet that Tibetans in exile have come to
appropriate and deploy in an effort to gain both standing in exile and independence for their country.26 However,
these stereotypes legitimize only certain goals and actions geared toward achieving themthe prevalent
stereotypes paint Tibetans mainly as passive victims requiring outside help. And this outside support comes at a
price. As Jamyang Norbu says, however hopeless their cause or marginal their survival, Tibetans are better off
living their own reality than being typecast in ethereal roles in the fantasies of the West.27 In spite of
commonalities and consistencies, it is complexity, oppositionality, and ambivalence that lie at the heart of Western
colonial representations. Imaginative practices through which the imperial West came to represent the Other can be
interrogated through the various strategies of representation involved. Though there was always a will to reify the
represented, this was undermined by the nature of representationit was not a singular act, but one necessitating
repetition. There always was a paradox in the Western representations of other culturesan unresolvable tension
between transparency and inscrutability, desire and disavowal, difference and familiarity. Therefore Exotica Tibet is
not a distinct phenomenon devoid of contrariety; rather, it is defined by a true complexio oppositorum, a rich
complexity of contradictions and oppositions.28 So near, yet so far! As Slavoj Zizek puts it: The very inconsistency
of this image of Tibet, with its direct coincidence of opposites seems to bear witness to its fantasmatic status.
Tibetans are portrayed as people leading a simple life of spiritual satisfaction, fully accepting their fate, liberated
from the excessive craving of the Western subject who is always searching for more, AND as a bunch of filthy,
cheating, cruel, sexually promiscuous primitives The social order is presented as a model of organic harmony,
AND as the tyranny of the cruel corrupted theocracy keeping ordinary people ignorant 29 The following section of
this article identifies the most common discursive strategies marshalled in the representation of the non-Western
Other in the context of Western imperialism and uses Exotica Tibet as the main empirical site of investigation.
Archive is commonly understood as a place or collection containing records, documents, photographs, film, or other
materials of historical interest. But archive can be taken to refer to a repository of stored memories, information,

Encounter with the Other did not take place in a vacuumit

was understood within pre-given images. What was knowable then was shaped by imperial
myths, rumours, and legends.30

prerogatives as well as pre-existing knowledge. This included those found in classical writings, religious and
biblical sources, mythology, traveller's tales (which in any case hardly differentiated between description and

These provided the cultural framework through which others

were seen, described and represented. Orientalism itself performed an archival
functiongeneralizations abounded as the attitude was pick an East, any East 31
and the story will be the same. As Said puts it: In a sense Orientalism was a library or archive of
legend), and fictional writings.

information commonly and, in some of its aspects, unanimously held.32 In situations where the culture was
relatively unknownlike the Tibetanhearsay, legends, and fantasies performed an ever more important archival
function.33 Representers of Tibet especially before the 19th century often drew upon these archives, supplementing
the rare missionary and travellers' accounts. Hugh Richardson's argument that the early allusions of Westerners
reveal little more than that the Tibetans had a reputation in neighbouring countries for strange ways and rare
magical powers34 holds true even for the 20th century. Evaluation of Tibet and its people was based on an archive
that made very little distinction between myths, legends, hearsay, and facts. Western writers constructed facts
not by referring to the place of Tibet but through repetition and cross-reference. Surveillance is a technique through

the non-Western subject is rendered a knowable, visible

object of disciplinary power.35 The gaze is not mere innocent curiosity: to gaze implies more
than to look atit signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer
is superior to the object of the gaze.36 Through observation, examination and
interpretation objects are differentiated, categorized, and identified, and made
ready to be acted upon. Objectification (fixing its essence) of the gazed goes hand in hand with its
which, under an overpowering gaze,

subjectificationgaze and surveillance are productive of identity of the gazed. Surveillance as a strategy for
representing the Other and rendering it disciplined is characterized by the all-knowing gaze of a white man, the
colonial master, the West. It enables both the visual possession of the body of the gazed and an interposition of

Observations then are presented as

dispassionate, objective facts. The gaze is disembodiedstatements are made as if
there is no seer behind the observations. This is not to say that non-Westerners are visually
technique which safely conceals the body of the gazer.37

impaired, powerless to gaze back at the West. But the authority of imperialism for a large part of the modern period
ensured that mastery and control remained a possession of Western man. The monarch of all I survey rhetorical
gesture remained peculiar to the West.38 Establishment of mastery through surveillance, gaze, and observation
were accompanied by consolidation of shades of political dominance over the object of the gaze. Appropriation was
done in the name of scientific curiosity, ethnographic material gathering, protection of simple masses from their
own despotic rulers, or the spread of progress. British colonial and military officials who went inside Tibet often
wrote their accounts as scientific exploration, or as exciting adventure,39 or simply as everyday observation.40

Behind the innocent sounding descriptions of travel like the narrative of a plant hunter's
adventures and discoveries41 lay the violence of imperialism . Though their gaze might be
considered as one of adventurer or romantic in Europe, the effect on the natives was the same as some steelyeyed militaristthe establishment and institutionalization of control through political
rule and knowledge formation. To know is a prelude to possess , especially if there is a huge
asymmetry of power. Such asymmetry led to situations where it was perfectly acceptable for a participant in the
Tibet mission of 19031904 to say: In fact the visible riches and treasures of Lhasa fairly made our mouths water.
The Tibetans however would not sell, and to our honour be it said; although Lhasa was a fair object to loot, and lay
in our power, not a farthings worth was forcibly [author adds this word in pen in a typed text] taken from it.42
Securing priceless artefacts through coercion and displaying them in the private and public collections in the West
was an essential feature of Western imperialism. Paradoxically, the project of rendering the Other knowable and the
image of it as primitive and simple went had in hand with recognition that there are elements of inscrutability and
mystery that eluded complete understanding of the Other. While discussing his own failure to fathom the unease of
Phuntsog, a Tibetan who is seen no longer as authentic native as he has learnt the language of the imperialist,
Edmund Candler, an early example of embedded reporter (a Daily Mail reporter accompanying the British invasion
of Tibet in 19031904), calls him a strange hybrid product of restless western energies, stirring and muddying the
shallows of the Eastern mind. Or are they depths? Who knows? I know nothing, only that these men are inscrutable,
and one cannot see into their hearts.43 Frustrated with the inaccessibility, invisibility and inscrutability of the
Orientals, Western desire subjects them to a relentless investigation. Veil becomes a metaphor for all that invites,
titillates, and yet resists Western knowing. It is one of those tropes through which Western fantasies of penetration
into the mysteries of the Orient and access to the interiority of the other are fantasmatically achieved.44
Surveillance and gaze facilitate other representational strategies that fix the Orient, the Other, particularly those

that seek to classify, differentiate and provide identity to the Other (and in turn to the Self). Differentiation and
classification, two crucial factors in the formation of the modern subject,45 are also evident in Western
representations of the Other. The ideational differentiation between the West and the Rest underpins these
representations. The need to articulate one's personal and collective self in terms of identity comes from an
internalization of this principle of differentiation. Classification occupies a central place in any account of nonWestern people. It polices discourses, assigns positions, regulates groups, and enforces boundaries.46 What
Lobsang Rampa47 says about his own treatment in the West reflects the dominant Western attitude toward the
exhibition of Oriental curiosities: Unfortunately, western people looked upon me as a curio, as a specimen who
should be put in a cage and shown off as a freak from the unknown. It made me wonder what would happen to my
old friends, the Yetis, if the westerners got hold of themas they are trying to do.48 Given the taxonomizing
predilection and conceit of Western imperialism, we can hardly disagree with Rampa's conjecture about the fate of
the yetis: (If) Western Man had his way, our poor old yetis would be captured, dissected, and preserved in

the classification of nonWestern peoples went hand in hand with the hierarchization and racialization of
cultures. Classifying the Other as barbarian or savage validated its dehumanization
and was seen as justification for use of violence to impose European norms .50 At the
top were the white Europeans and at the bottom were primitive Africans and
aboriginal populations in the new world. Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and others
occupied different positions in the hierarchical table. The 19th and 20th century obsession with
spirit.49 While some classifications may be essential for understanding, often

racializing culture can be seen in the case of Tibetans too where different commentators sought to identify
characteristics of the Tibetan race. A typical example was Graham Sandberg who was unflattering in his
comments about the Tibetan race as a weak and cowardly people, their pusillanimity rendering them readily
submissive.51 The fact that racism has less to do with colour and more to do with power relations becomes
evident in the British treatment of Irish as coloured, as white negroes,52 during the 19th century. Captain
William Frederick O'Connor's observation at the start of the 20th century about Tibet is illustrative: Common
people are cheerful, happy-go-lucky creatures, absurdly like the Irish in their ways, and sometimes even in their
features.53 On the other hand, French traveller Alexandra David-Neel finds that dobdobs, the Lhasa monk police,
looks like a real negro.54 Differentiation, classification and identification, when combined with racialization,
evolutionism and hierarchization, lead to the

Thus we advocate a spectral analysis of the political forcing of

the debate space to deconstruct the epistemological hauntings
caused by the Maoist understanding of China. Only by
confronting the Ghosts can we access the accountability of the
real world thus breaking out of the disarticulated lens of
politics and expression that current western theory
fundamentally based upon.

History is locked in a misunderstood counter narrative that

causes a disruptive deferral from the driving force behind
politics. Only by embracing specters through a hauntological
counter method can the epistemologies of the past be broken.
We must force history to fold on itself to realize the ghosts
surrounding the present.
Colmeiro 11 Jos Colmeiro. Professor at the University of Auckland specializing
in Spanish literature and cultural studies, contemporary Galician culture, gender,
cinema, music, and memory studies. Nation of Ghosts?: Haunting, Historical
Memory and Forgetting in Post-Franco Spain ( [online article], 452F. Electronic

journal of theory of literature and comparative literature, 4, 17-34, [Consulted on:

dd/mm/aa], < http://www.452f.com/index.php/en/jose-colmeiro.html >)
The study of memory and collective identity formation has become a major area of
academic research in our days, cutting across the boundaries of long established disciplines in Social
Sciences and Arts and Letters. Narratives of memory and collective identity , and the academic
discourses that examine them and construct them, have experienced enormous growth in recent years,
and no discipline in the Humanities, whether cultural anthropology, literature, cinema, history or political science,
has been impervious to its advance. As interdisciplinarity, with the advent of cultural studies, is fast becoming the
norm rather than the exception in the dominant Anglo academic world, and gaining greater visibility everywhere ,

traditional boundaries are being redrawn, and the constitution of discreet fields of
knowledge is undergoing an extensive transformation . Perhaps arguably, some of the most
innovative leading-edge research in the Humanities is currently taking place at the intersections and margins of

Literature, founded on the principles of

interdisciplinarity and the crossnational study of literature s, is potentially well situated to
profit from this paradigmatic shift, but is also subject to radical reconfiguration , as the
traditional theoretical certainties that constructed its edifice have been eroded in
recent years (such as eurocentrism, humanism, and universalism). So how are we to explain this
traditional disciplines and canons. The field of Comparative

unprecedented attention to the study of memory and identity in our age? What approaches has critical theory
generated to deal with these issues, and what are the limits, possibilities, and challenges for cultural studies in
general, and for literary studies and comparative literature in particular? In the following pages, I will try to delimit
some of the theoretical questions that inform the current debates of memory and collective identity, and their
implications for the case study of contemporary Spain. Undoubtedly, the changing paradigms in current critical and
literary theory have directly influenced the renewed attention to memory and collective identity studies.

Poststructuralist theorizations of difference, a central concept in any modern

exploration of cultural identity, have radically repositioned the traditional
configurations of center and margins, and have questioned the exclusion/inclusion
20A Nation of Ghosts?: Haunting, Historical Memory and Forgetting in Post-Franco Spain - Jos Colmeiro 452F. #04
(2011) 17-34. dynamics involved in canon formation, while challenging the philosophical tenets of Western thought
(Derrida). These theories have also provided the intellectual tools for deconstructing pervasive dichotomies such as
present/past, presence/absence, written/oral, high/low, History/story that have defined traditional representation.

Challenging those established structures of power, the poststructuralist

critique of academic discourses has refocused the interest towards
alternative configurations on the margins of power and traditionally
marginalized or excluded stories from underrepresented groups, as well as their
neglected memories and collective identities. Similarly, the recurring postmodern assessment that
our contemporary global culture suffers amnesia , and its accompanying rhetoric of mourning and
obsession with the loss of identity, as seen in the pervasive signs of fragmentation, dismemberment,
simulacra, fissures and the cultivation of nostalgia, has renovated the interest for
the recovery of memory and cultural identity. In a lament over the disappearance of traditional
forms of memory in modern societies, Pierre Nora has noted that we speak so much of memory
because there is so little of it left (7). Andreas Huyssen has expressed eloquently the paradoxical
dynamics of memory and forgetting: The spread of amnesia in our culture is matched by a relentless fascination

postcolonial theories have questioned metropolitan

hegemony and cultural homogeneity, while refocusing the attention to
multiculturalism and the construction of subaltern identities (Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak).
with memory and the past (254). Likewise,

Feminism and queer studies have provided fundamental theoretical insights into the construction of gender and
sexual identities and different process of remembrance (Butler). Diaspora and globalization studies have also
focused on the role of collective memories in the formation of group identities in a constantly shifting world (Said,
Castells, Garca Canclini). The study of collective memory represents an alternative to official national
historiographies, potentially giving voice to the subjects traditionally excluded from representation, minority and
subaltern groups, on the basis of cultural contingencies such as ethnicity, language, class, gender and sexuality,
among others. In all those areas, reconstructing the histories of those marginalized groups and understanding the

formation of collective identities are enterprises that need to be undertaken hand in hand. Memory and collective
identity have also become intensely debated topics in social discourses and the mass media, as issues of cultural
identity have frequently focused on the construction of cultural and historical memories. This has been particularly
the case in the context of post cold war and post dictatorship societies in need to reopen and investigate their past,
which had been heavy guarded and repressed, and the new challenges provoked by the currents 21A Nation of
Ghosts?: Haunting, Historical Memory and Forgetting in Post-Franco Spain - Jos Colmeiro 452F. #04 (2011) 17-34.
of globalization (Barahona De Brito et al. 2001; Waisman and Rein 2005; Martn-Estudillo and Roberto Ampuero
2008). The apparent paradox of the current obsession with memory (Huyssen) in our forgetful contemporary
societies needs to be put in the same context of the paradigmatic shifts in cultural studies mentioned above, and
the ensuing double paradox of the centrality of marginality and the role of cultural difference in identity formation.

phenomena are a reflection of the enormous social and

historical changes that have occurred globally in the last decades of the 20th
century, and the cultural anxieties generated by the unleashing of the currents of
globalization and the resulting fear of collective forgetting. Several theories of memory have
My hypothesis is that these

become particularly useful for the study of collective identity in cultural studies. It is worth remembering two
important aspects of Maurice Halbwachss classic theory of collective memory, which, quite fittingly coming from a
sociologist, privileged the social dimension of remembrance. On the one hand, his conceptualization of memory as
a social construction, with his tenet that individuals always use social frameworks when they remember (40). On

memory of the past is a reconstruction, more than a recovery,

reenacted from the present and always informed by that present: Even at the moment of
the other, his notion that the

reproducing the past our imagination remains under the influence of the present social milieu (49). The past is
recovered from the present, but it is not simply past, since the process of recovery of the past can have direct and
indirect repercussions for actions in the present. Indeed, what we refer to as collective memory, many times is a
present collective consciousness of the past, rather than personally lived memories. Thus for Silvia Molloy, historical
memory is una base de saberes fragmentarios compartidos por un grupo (257). More recently, the study of
collective memory in cultural and literary studies has been energized by the work of historian Pierre Nora and his
influential theory of lieux de mmoire, as material, symbolic, and functional sites of memory. According to Nora,
in our modern societies characterized by the prevalence of mass culture on a global scale, memory has ceased to
have the traditional channels and functions of premodern societies, in part because it has been replaced by history.
Instead, Nora acknowledges the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity
persists (Nora 7). These new spaces of remembrance are lieux de mmoire, defined by Davis and Starn as
places where memories converge, condense, conflict, and define relationships between past, present, and future
(Davis 3). Monuments, museums, commemorations, symbols, books, documentaries, all can be considered
collective sites of memory, and the meanings taking shape in those sites have potential impact in the formation
and consolidation of modern 22A Nation of Ghosts?: Haunting, Historical Memory and Forgetting in Post-Franco
Spain - Jos Colmeiro 452F. #04 (2011) 17-34. collective identities. Within poststructuralist and postcolonial
cultural studies there has developed a critique of the traditional emphasis on the recovery of the past, as the
essential element of collective identity. While recognizing the absolute importance that the gaps in the narratives of
the past be acknowledged, and silences be articulated, there has been a refocusing from simple recovery to
questioning what we do collectively with that past, and how we try to deal, or not, with it. For cultural theorist
Stuart Hall, from a postcolonial identity perspective, the crucial point involves more than the actual recovery or
discovery the past, focusing more on how that process is undertaken, and how those narratives are retold for the
interest of the present (and future). He suggests that cultural practices and narratives of identity such as literature
or cinema go beyond: not the rediscovery but the production of identity. Not an identity grounded in the
archaeology, but in the retelling of the past (224). The interest lies in the actual process of reconstruction of the
past, and the ensuing construction of collective identities. More than simply identity understood as being, which is
a basic and necessary sense of identity, he aims for a cultural identity as the process of becoming, thus
challenging any preconstructed or received notions of identity. Just like memories by definition are not stable or
fixed, but always in a process of reconstruction, so are cultural identities, occurring in a historical frame, and always
evolving. Thus, Halls concept of cultural identity is not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and
culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental
mark. It is not once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return (226).
Hall recognizes the dangers inherent in any cultural practice that essentializes the past, as the mythical point of
origin and return, and its fetishization of the past, instead underlining the effect of our contextual cultural
positionality in regards to that past: Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything
which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past,
they are subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in mere recovery
of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity,
identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the
narratives of the past. (225). Other contemporary critics have also noted how collective memory and identity are
mutually supportive cultural constructions following a continuous process of selectively forgetting and
remembering. Under this light, the constructions of memory and collective identity have to be seen side by side. On

a special issue of Representations on Memory and History, Davis and Starn have noted: We can say 23A Nation of
Ghosts?: Haunting, Historical Memory and Forgetting in Post-Franco Spain - Jos Colmeiro 452F. #04 (2011) 17-34.
that identity depends on memory, whether we mean by that a core self that remembers its earlier states or,

the narratives that construct (and deconstruct) identities by comparing

once upon a time and here and now (4). Memory stands as the founding block of collective
identity, as Andreas Huyssen as noted: Without memory, without reading the traces of
the past, there can be no recognition of difference (), no tolerance for the
rich complexities and instabilities of personal, cultural, political and
national identities (252). Memory forms the basis for a sense of cultural collective identity marked by
poststructurally,

those contingencies of difference such as class, gender, language and ethnicity. The construction of national
identities is directly shaped by the recollection of collective memories of a common past .

As such, memory
has an important function as a site of struggle and resistance for oppressed groups
(ethnic and linguistic minorities, political dissidents, women, exiles, migrants, etc.) in their construction of
alternative cultural identities, against official narratives of the past that has excluded them. T hese

cultural
contingencies can, and often do, cross the geopolitical national boundaries, and
therefore transnational communities are formed. In addition, the new forces of
globalization and the transformation of transnational public spheres are also influencing the existing channels
of remembrance, and the constitution of collective identities that do not coincide with the nation-state (Assmann
and Conrad).

The aff is more than a focus on discourse - its an act of micro

political re interpretation our deconstructive method through
an individual stasis point of history acts as a moment of
singularity only by understanding the manifolds of history
can the political be free from diffrance.
Armstrong 10
Philip Armstrong literary analysist for Culture Machine MARTIN MCQUILLAN
(2009) DECONSTRUCTION AFTER 9/11. NEW YORK AND LONDON: ROUTLEDGE. ISBN
978-0-415-96494-4.
MAY 2010
No doubt this other literature and the potential readings, conversations, disputes, and conflicts of interpretation it
opens up are waiting in the wings of Deconstruction After 9/11, haunting its margins. It might even be unjust to cite
them in such abbreviated form here were it not that the framing of the book in terms of war and the war on terror
are precisely the terms that animate an increasingly large body of literature far from the Derridean corpus. But it is
also clear that McQuillans interests in writing Deconstruction After 9/11 appear to lie elsewhere. For the ambition
ARMSTRONG DECONSTRUCTION AFTER 9/11 CM REVIEWS 2010 www.culturemachine.net 10 suggested
throughout is to defend deconstruction above all by refusing the reduction of Derridas writings to a wellintentioned liberalism (108). As McQuillan asks with impatience and clear exasperation (and one can easily imagine
the contexts in which this (still) becomes necessary to ask): When

will we be rid of the notion

that someone must stand on a picket line in the name of deconstruction
before its political nature is taken seriously? (93). What textual activism would
begin to account for in such a context is not only that the idea of the picket line
must always already be in deconstruction (93) or that tele-technologies such as e-mail
jamming might transform the space of the political today (185); textual activism would also be
governed by a judicious patient rationalism (7), open to and simultaneously opening up the
world of the enlightenment to come (as Derrida phrases it in Rogues and as iek once wished for
in the reception of Lacan). Indeed, from the opening lines of the book, what is affirmed throughout is
deconstructions rapport with a new form of Enlightenment-without-conditions (ix); in the absence of any

the
singularity and alterity of the new day that arrives tomorrow , each time we
programmable response to the situations of the contemporary public space and out of respect for

respond in vigilance to what calls for thought and action we must reimagine that
answer anew as a creative act of an unconditional rationality (ix). It is in this sense
that reading and textual activism would be nothing less than a mode of existing in
the world, an interminable, unconditional critical liveliness to the world around us, its histories,
and its future (xi) (and here we might hear one of those moments of de Manian affirmation that punctuate the
text with some frequency). If philosophys task lies in its affirmation of alterity and singularity and an
affirmation that unfolds by refusing the distinctions between theory and practice,
text and world, that close off the force of the event and the encounter then such an
enlightened affirmation would not only think the truth to power but define a form
of textual activism that is not a counter-force to power but a submission
to a wider rhythm which undoes the very vertices of the sovereignty of
power (32)in short, such a task would lend itself both to a mode or idiom of deconstruction
not yet realized (154), as well as to a linguistics of literariness that becomes (in de Man own words) a
powerful and indispensible tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations (cited 91). This affirmation is thus a

bind deconstruction to rethinking

what constitutes the political today, which includes not only the ongoing
deconstruction of historicity as it unfolds before us as politics (x) but a redistribution of
constitutive aspect of McQuillans lucid unraveling of the strands that

the ARMSTRONG DECONSTRUCTION AFTER 9/11 CM REVIEWS 2010 www.culturemachine.net 11 possible and
impossible within political culture (15). As de Man himself would acknowledge, this affirmation not only leaves the
text open to (mis)reading but suggests the multiple ways in which we are bound to (mis)read Deconstruction After
9/11 as a promise of political change (de Man 1979: 277).

Our affirmation exposes the arbitrary nature of the hierarchies

drawn by China Watching and reveals the ways in which
ethnocentric representations of China produce racialized and
violent orientations.
Pan 12 Chengxin, Knowledge, desire and power in global politics: Western
representations of Chinas rise, pg. 9-12
This book draws on deconstructive and constructivist approaches . Since it is not a book about either
approach or about ontology/epistemology per se, it will not systematically engage with those theoretical issues except for the following outline of their

The deconstructive approach is employed to question the

underlying dichotomy of reality/knowledge in Western study of China's
international relations. My contention is that the paradigms of 'China threat' and 'China
opportunity' are not 'true' (or 'false') representations of Chinese reality, but rather
discursive strategies of Othering predicated on certain presuppositions and foreunderstandings in Western tradition, desire, and self-imagination . From a constructivist standpoint, I then argue
relevance to this study.

that these paradigms are not mere word games or fanciful imaginations that have nothing to do with China. To the extent that they condition the way we

my
deconstructive analysis is not a mere textual exercise; it is concerned with the
complex connections between these paradigms and Sino-Western interactions . These
give meaning to that country, they are socially constitutive of it, not least by shaping the way we deal with it in practice. Accordingly,

arguments will be fleshed out in the main chapters, but for now some explication of the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this book is in
order. Deconstructing Reality/Knowledge: Knowledge as Situated Interpretation As a complex and controversial strategy in philosophical and literary

I define the
primary function of deconstruction as serving to expose the artificial and
arbitrary nature of oppositions, dichotomies, and hierarchies that have been
taken for granted in a certain discourse. In this way, deconstruction helps reveal
the discursive and social practices of exclusion and marginalisation which
are chiefly responsible for maintaining and reproducing the 'naturalness' of those
binary oppositions and hierarchies." In mainstream IR discourses on China, one fundamental binary opposition is the
criticism, deconstruction defies clear definition and explanation. At the risk of oversimplifying this slippery yet important term,

dichotomy of reality and knowledge. According to this dualism. Chinese reality exists prior to and independent of China knowledge, with the latter derived

from the former mainly through scientific research. Yet, this binary assumption about Chinese reality and China knowledge is deeply flawed and will be

social reality, has no a priori or independent meaning

outside of knowledge and discourse. If there appears to be an objective fact out there, that is because people who believe so
already share a common discourse about that 'fact'. Thus, thought and reality are not two discrete, mutually
exclusive categories as they appear." They are inherently interconnected. Indeed, 'interconnectedness' is not strong enough
a word to depict their almost inseparable ontological existence, for it is only through knowledge and discourse that
social reality comes into being and makes sense , just as it is only through light that things can become visible to
our eyes. In the words of Maja Zehfuss, 'what we conceptualise as real is itself an effect of representations'.50 The world appears
observable and meaningful to us never directly through itself, but only 'indirectly'
through the 'light of interpretation' cast by texts, discourses, and language. If we merely
subject to deconstruction. I submit that reality, or at least

stare at things without processing them through thought and language, our gaze will be like a blank look, unable to capture much meaning despite their
clear presence in front of our eyes. As soon as we begin to describe what we have seen, that description must already be captive to language and prior

'The world exists independently of language', notes David Campbell, 'but we

can never know that (beyond the fact of its assertion), because the existence of the
world is literally inconceivable outside of language and our traditions of
interpretation'. 51For instance, China as the worlds most populous nation seems to
be a self-evident fact both beyond doubt and beyond interpretation. Yet. such
apparently objective, non-interpreted facts are not the primary concern of China
watchers. No scholar is likely to make a career out of collecting and writing on such
'trivia' alone, just as no anthropologist would find it either stimulating or worthwhile
to 'go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar' . 2 For us, often what matters is not 'pure' reality, but
knowledge.

interpreted and contested reality. At issue here is not just whether China is the world's most populous nation, but also the what?' questions: What that

soon as meaning is at issue, commonlyagreed 'brute-facts' will be hard to come by. In the eyes of nineteenth-century
missionaries, a populous China represented a promised land for religious
conversion. During WWII, the US saw China's massive manpower as a great asset in
fighting the Japanese. For business people whose worldview is inevitably defined by
market and profit, China's vast population takes on a quality of enormous
commercial opportunities. By contrast, for racists or racially sensitive observers, 1.3
billion Chinese may symbolise 'Yellow Peril' and amount to a 'China threat'. Clearly,
none of these claims are stand-alone facts; as 'facts', they are always already a product of particular interpretation.
means (or often, will mean) for China and the world and what to do about it. As

Indeed, even the 'bare-bone' fact that China is the most populous nation is not entirely independent of language and interpretation, given that concepts

Consequently, social
reality, which is what I mean by 'reality' or 'fact' throughout this book, is inherently discursive and interpretive,
and interpretation cannot be disconnected from thought, knowledge, and language .
such as nation and population are modern inventions and constructs rather than naturally existing categories.

To quote philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, Man lives with his objects chiefly-in fact, since his feeling and acting depends on his perceptions,
one may say exclusively-as language presents them to him. By the same process whereby he spins language out of his own being, he ensnares himself in
it; and each language draws a magic circle round the people to which it belongs, a circle from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another.53 Of course, to say that social reality is bound up with language and interpretation is not to argue that reality can be freely arranged into any
number of discursive permutations or that one interpretation is as valid as another. We cannot access reality except through language, but this is not the
same as saying that we cannot know anything beyond language per se, or that all knowing makes equal sense to everyone-were that the case, we in the
academia might as well go home and find another line of work.