The Fallacy of Neo-orientalism and the Risk of Imperialism: How American Politics Mobilize Novelists

ABSTRACT

The Muslim world has been plagued by imperial interests, cultural ravaging and plundering, unequal partnership with the West. However, since the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks, the Arab world has moved to the center of political and cultural debates and attracted the major number of representations in American writings. These writings form a new phenomenon called neo-orientalism and revolve around a major theme: Muslim Arabs as victims of fundamentalist dogma. This study explores the ways in which neo-orientalism developed and was communicated to the reader in the United States after 9/11. The literature on this phenomenon is limited; therefore, there exists a need for the study of neo-orientalism through contemporary fictions that deal directly with Arab-American relationship. This study also investigates the assumption implicit in the conception that contemporary American novel is in solidarity with the state ignoring its imperial ambitions and its saturation with hegemonic practices. In response to the terrorist attacks, novel has been one of the most effective genres to represent the feelings of the nation and the concern of the country. This part of the study will refer to different attitudes and political orientations of novelists, which allow novel to follow the mainstream politics and do not grapple with the hegemonic interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Neo-orientalism
• imperialism
• Arabs
• the United States
• American novel

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the approval and the support of this study by the Deanship of Scientific Research at Northern Border University, Arar, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, under the grant no. 8157-EAR-2019-1-10-F.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Grand strategy, also called high strategy, refers to the purposeful employment of all types of power available to a achieve security. Nina Silove’s study of grand strategy investigates whether states respond to threats to achieve security or use forces to attain hegemony. Silove concludes that the role of grand strategy is to direct all the resources of the state towards the attainment of the political interests. She also labels three concepts of grand strategy: “grand plans,” “grand principles,” and “grand behavior” (Silove 2018, 56).

2 Full-spectrum dominance is where a military structure achieves control over all elements of the battlespace using land, air, maritime, space, and cyber based assets. Full spectrum dominance includes the physical battlespace, i.e., air, surface and sub-surface, as well as the electromagnetic spectrum and information space. Control implies that freedom of the opposition force to exploit the battlespace is wholly constrained.

3 Epistemological relativism refers to a construct of knowledge on societies that is governed by variables such as culture, people, time, place, traditions and practices (Denery 2009, 42).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Northern Border University [Grant No. 8057-EAR-2019-1-10-F].

Notes on contributors

Mubarak Altwaiji

Mubarak Altwaiji is a Yemeni associate professor of literary theory & criticism and head of the Department of English Language Skills at Northern Border University, Saudi Arabia. He is the author of “Neo-Orientalism and the Neo-Imperialism Thesis: Post-9/11 US and Arab World Relationship.” He is a senior researcher in the field of neo-orientalist studies and post 9/11 American literature.

Ebrahim Alwuraafi

Ebrahim Alwuraafi is an assistant professor of English literature at the Department of English Language and Literature, Al Baha University, Saudi Arabia. His main areas of interest are postcolonial writing, Arab American writing and Arab writing in translation.