Srinivas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel: A Roundtable Discussion

Aravamudan coins the phrase “Enlightenment Orientalism” to foreground the historicism of its oxymoronic signification. The title invites us to query how there could be anything ‘enlightened’ about ‘Orientalism,’ since the term entered twentieth-century scholarly parlance as signifying a hegemonic imperialist movement. Aravamudan answers the query by challenging the assumption that Orientalism, understood as Europe’s engagement with the East, was always already imperialist in intent and form and demonstrating that the eighteenth century’s interest in the East is defined by its curiosity about, and experimentation with, literature and philosophy from China, India, and the Levant. Enlightenment Orientalism has been a victim of, what Aravamudan calls, “Saidian Orientalism,” referring to Edward Said’s masterful depiction of a colonizing nineteenth-century discourse. Instead of reading eighteenth-century European encounters with the East as part of a progressive history that inevitably ends in our post-colonial moment, the book traces an alternative strain of Orientalism, rising out of Enlightenment forms of inquiry. Enlightenment Orientalism, then, is the epistemologically inventive, open-ended, cosmopolitan sister to its hegemonic, imperialist, Victorian brother. In reanimating an eighteenth-century discourse in the twenty-first century, one blinded to us in the intervening centuries by a nineteenth-century Orientalism, Aravamudan is part of a larger movement to reposition the Enlightenment outside a Horkheimer and Adorno frame in which the origin of modernity’s tyranny is located in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment Orientalism begins from a different perspective, refusing to read the period through the glasses of hindsight and reading it instead for alternative historical teleologies than the one that became dominant. I call this movement, after Giovanni Arrighi’s work on historical cycles, ‘the long twentieth century.’ By working with a historical methodology that reads our contemporary global moment as echoing the cycle of accumulation in the eighteenth century, the long twentieth-century scholar thinks about how the present moment has more in common with the eighteenth century than anything in between. Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic exemplifies this scholarship; Baucom argues that “as [Walter] Benjamin’s nineteenth century repeats or inherits the seventeenth century by intensifying it, so the long twentieth century under discussion here extends or inherits the eighteenth by intensifying it.” In reanimating an Enlightenment Orientalism, Aravamudan does for the East what Baucom did for the Atlantic; he makes readable and knowable an eighteenth-century speculative philosophical Orientalism that was unknowable until the twenty-first century. What constitutes this knowledge? What alternative modes of thinking about the East does Enlightenment Orientalism unearth? First and foremost, it establishes the centrality of the East to the Enlightenment philosophical project of skeptical investigation through comparative analysis. What Aravamudan calls the genre of “pseudoethnography” — which includes texts such as The Turkish Spy and Lettres Persanes and is defined by its transcultural thought-experiments comparing West with East — unleashes a radically destabilized understanding of the European subject, not one whose claim to world dominance is presupposed. When the universalist humanist project is viewed from the perspective of these skeptical texts, Europe—in particular, France and Britain—is not seen as encountering the East from a position of dominance but from an “experimental, prospective, and antifoundationalist” point of view (4). Whereas a Saidian Orientalism understands space as territory, Enlightenment Orientalism is about a utopic universal in which space is transversal. A ‘long twentieth century’ literary history that emphasizes fiction’s cosmopolitan roots makes readable many texts that were largely unreadable to twentieth-century scholarship: cosmological fantasies like Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes; philosophical adaptations of the Fables of Pilpay; and libertine satires such as Crébillon’s Le Sopha. Fantasy as a central mode of prose fiction is one of the most persuasive new objects that …