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Occidentalism

Definition

In cultural studies and related fields, the term and concept of Occidentalism is applied to two highly diverging ways of representing the so-called Western world (Occident): First, departing from Edward Said’s study Orientalism (1978), a study of Western stereotypes about the Eastern World (the “Orient”), Occidentalism defines a perspective of resentment against the “Occident” (or “the West”) and the related societies and values (see Buruma and Margalit, Occidentalism). The concept can, thus, also be understood as an enemy image against modernity.

The second conceptualization of Occidentalism is owed predominantly to Fernando Coronil (1996) who defined Occidentalism as the condition of possibility of historical and present forms of Orientalisms. According to this notion, Occidentalism serves as constructing occidental self-assurance and postulating Occidental values as superior, while simultaneously producing Oriental Othering. Since this second understanding is particularly relevant for the context of the Americas, it shall be the focus of this article.

Occidentalism in the Americas

Following Fernando Coronil, the concept of Occidentalism provides not the result or effect, but the condition of possibility for Orientalist projections. Occidentalism is, thus, a discourse from and about the West that prepares the ground for discourses of the West’s Others. Initially, this perspective emerged out of a critical reflection of Latin American realities. It is based on the modernity/coloniality approach which operates within a modified world-systems analysis model that drew from dependency theory, liberation theology, Latin American philosophy, and later also Chicana feminism, subaltern studies, and postcolonial studies (Boatcă, 81 ff, Escobar 180-190).

Elaborating on approaches focusing on Orientalist projections onto the colonized Other, such as Said’s seminal study on stereotypical Western representations of the East, Occidentalism zooms in on the construction of occidental superiority as expressed in a hegemonic epistemology and structural coloniality. In his 1996 essay “Beyond Occidentalism. Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories”, Coronil searches for a space in which geo-historical categories for a non-imperial world can be imagined after the end of the bipolar world system of the Cold War era. Occidentalism is, thus, more a theoretical concept than a historical discourse. He describes Occidentalism as “the ensemble of representational practices that participate in the production of conceptions of the world.” According to Coronil, such conceptions “separate the world’s components into bounded units” and “disaggregate their relational histories”, they “turn difference into hierarchy” and “naturalize these representations; and thus, […] intervene, however unwittingly, in the reproduction of existing asymmetrical power relations” (57).

While Orientalism, as pursued by Said, focuses on the British colonies in the late 18th and 19th centuries and on literary and cultural productions, Occidentalism in the Americas focuses on the European colonies in the so-called New World, takes the European Conquest of 1492 as a starting point, and has a stronger economic and political focus on cultural productions of self and alterity. Further, Coronil proposes a “politics of epistemology” which integrates the own and little questioned premises of knowing and knowledge as part of the analysis.

According to Manuela Boatcă (2015: 84 ff.), Occidentalism, unlike Eurocentrism, is a pan-Western discourse that has historically produced various “global designs”. Occidentalism is based on the two foundational myths of evolutionism, the linear and one-directional development of human civilization from nature to Western civilization, and dualism, the notion of insuperable natural binary differences between Europeans and non-Europeans, such as civilized-primitive, irrational-rational, modern-traditional. In accordance to the contextual geopolitical and economic settings, these – partly coinciding and overlapping – designs or patterns were thus organized along spatial and temporal lines. The different designs do not represent clear-cut steps but often persisted and intermingled. The following table sums up the different patterns in a schematic way:

1. As a first pattern, the colonial beginnings and the Christian mission were marked by the imperial difference within Europe, and the colonial difference between Europe and its overseas colonies and a policy of spatial racialization (ibd. 86). It organizes the capitalist world economy as a modern and colonial system based on a racial matrix constructing the colonized cultures as uncivilized because of their ‘lack’ of Christian faith as well as ‘legitimate’ cultural and economic systems, in accordance with the early modern Christian European worldview of an Orbis Universalis Christianus. In a letter dated October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus described the inhabitants of the ‘New World’ in an infantilizing manner typical of this worldview and stressed the need of their conversion as one of the justifications of the colonial enterprise.

This logic of self-affirmation through the subordination of the newly encountered Others referred to cultural and bodily techniques, rather than to biologistic naturalized concepts of ‘racial difference’ and the body itself. However, already with the completion of the so-called Spanish Reconquista in 1492, religious differences started to become increasingly defined in racialized terms. The banishment of the Arabs (racialized as ‘moros’/’Moors’) from Spain and the re-establishment of the Rule of the Catholic Kings was legitimized through the Law of the limpieza de sangre [purity of blood] and the displacement or enforcement of christening of Jews. With the expulsion of Jews and Arabs from the Iberian Peninsula and the conquest of ‘America’, Christianity became “the first global design of the modern/colonial world system” (Mignolo 2000), excluding and Othering “moors” and Jews (see Shohat and Stam 2012), and, thus, the “anchor of Occidentalism”.The Occidentalist imaginary emerging subsequently, employed gender as a metaphor representing the conquered territories as female (see McClintock 1995)

2. From the 18th century on, the second pattern, Enlightenment: The Civilizing Mission, transferred spatial boundary into a chronological difference, positioning Europe as the end of universal history (see Hegel 1833). The European Man and modern reason started being spatially situated in Europe and temporally at the peak of the social evolution, and the space of “world history”, the threshold of which all non-European regions would still have to pass. With the emergence of scientific racism, the binary opposition shifted towards notions of progress vs. backwardness and biologistic forms of racialization.

Occidentalism provided the precondition and the “body politics and geo-politics of knowledge” for the Orientalist projections that evolved during the European enlightenment (Mignolo 2008: 21, 2005: 115). The Occident, as a universal and privileged locus of enunciation, then became the position from which single stories of the own superiority and the inferiority of the Other could be produced and authorized as definitive stories, as expressed in cartographies, maps, naming practices, and hegemony of scripture (over other forms of narration).

3. Post-War and Turn of the Millenium: Development and the Global Market. After World War II, the formal end of colonialism and scientific racism, the Occidental pattern transformed into a naturalized notion of culture (Balibar 1996). The respective hierarchical pattern of different “cultures” or “ethnicities” was first met with a politics of narrations of developmentalism (as launched by U.S. and other Western powers’ foreign policies).

4. Lately, Occidentalism persists in form of notions of globalization and globalcentrism, which disguises continuous structures of Occidental domination and neoliberalization as market mechanisms (Coronil 2000), and the related paradigm of democratization. It is also reflected in the respective migration and citizenship regimes, which follow (neo-colonially) racialized and gendered patterns (see Boatcă and Roth 2016).

Critical Acclaim

Unlike national approaches or approaches on Eurocentrism, Occidentalism takes the capitalist, and simultaneously, modern and colonial world system as reference and enables to bring the historical and persistent entanglements, interdependencies, and hierarchical asymmetries into view. For the Americas in particular, and for postcolonial studies and decolonial approaches more generally, an Occidental perspectivization helps shift the focus to the early phase of European colonialist expansion in the Americas, and, thus, the Spanish and Portuguese et. al. colonies. Such a perspective further enables to address the mutual and reciprocal constitution of processes of Othering in the contexts of the colonial encounter and under the resulting power constellations. Furthermore, an Occidentalism lens sheds light on the need for a critique of hegemony. Gabriele Dietze (2010) respectively proposes a “critical Occidentalism” as a theoretical, political, and epistemic perspective (self-)critical of Western hegemony, from which the imperial power asymmetries resulting from the capitalist world system can be put under scrutiny.

However, since macro-level approaches tend to be schematic, representatives of the modern/colonial approach (Quijano, Mignolo) have pointed at the importance of racialization absent in earlier world systems analyses, and Escobar (2007) and Boatcă (2015) have emphasized the neglection of gendering, which has, so far, been partial and under-theorized or marginalized (for exceptions see Bennholdt-Thomsen 1984, Mies 1986, Anzaldúa 1987, Wynter 2003, Lugones 2007 and 2009). In order to take the combined logic of racial, ethnic, and gender Othering into account, an Occidental approach, therefore, requires a combinatory lens, which pays credit also to the meso- and micro level dimensions (such as an intersectional(ity) lens). Further, in order to think beyond the asymmetries related to Occidetalism, a self-critical perspective of the hegemonic side is crucial.

Julia Roth

Please cite as:
Roth, Julia. 2017. “Occidentalism.” InterAmerican Wiki: Terms - Concepts - Critical Perspectives. https://uni-bielefeld.de/einrichtungen/cias/wiki/o/occidentalism.xml.

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