Orientalism Otherwise: A Poetics of Adjacency in Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental

Abstract

This essay suggests that we reconsider orientalism by including women’s largely disregarded perspectives about the orient. It focuses on Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental as a model for disorientalizing the Orient through a poetics of adjacency – a creative process that puts voices, events, and circumstances side-by-side using modes borrowed from narrative’s sister arts – to suggest a basis for an orientalism that doesn’t forget Said’s Orientalism, but rather sets beside it another orient that modifies it. Generated by aesthetic strategies from cinematography and music, Djavadi creates the disoriental subject, one who has left the Orient but carries with her an alternate orient emerging from comparative practice built upon modes of recontextualization in the Kuleshov effect, of juxtaposition in rear projection, and of inversion suggested by the 45-rpm record. Notions of disorientation, beside, and cultural collage underwrite Djavadi’s plan of besidedness, which conceives an orient for the disoriental subject.

Keywords:

• Adjacency
• comparison
• disoriental
• Djavadi, Négar
• Kuleshov effect
• orient
• Orientalism
• rear projection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Djavadi sees promise in the adjective “oriental”, which she suggests “might unite all of these peoples [with their various ‘identitarian, religious and ancestral conflict’] under one term, signifying that they have something common among them” (Krause 2019).

2 Nanquette writes: “the perception of a common spirit between French and Iranians … was partly supposed to be linked to a similar history as leading civilizations” (2013, 13).

3 See also Lowe (1991, x), who challenges the consistency with which Orientalism conceives the Orient, suggesting instead that “the Orient – is constituted, is made possible, precisely by [its] nonidentity through time”; she argues for “a conception of orientalism as heterogeneous and contradictory” (5), which “is borne out most simply in the different meanings of ‘the Orient’ over time” (7). Said comes to agree with Lowe; in the 1994 preface to Orientalism, he writes that “neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other” (xvii).

4 Said notes in his afterword to Orientalism that Albert Hourani had written in 1992 to tell Said that his “book had the unfortunate effect of making it almost impossible to use the term ‘Orientalism’ in a neutral sense, so much had it become a term of abuse” (340).

5 The fiction recalls the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

6 Foucault observes the Persian rug as representative of the Persian garden, an exemplary heterotopic space.