The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0664 Friday, 14 July 2006
From: Cary DiPietro <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Jul 2006 03:55:09 +0900
Subject: 17.0657 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0657 Shakespeare and Islam
To begin, V K Inman responds to passages of my last post which were not
authored by me, but quoted from an earlier post by Nabie Swaray. As I
wrote then, I share Inman's reservations about the language of the
posts, and while I find the analogy between contemporary Western
perceptions of Islam (admittedly ignorant and Eurocentric) and those of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries (equally ignorant and Eurocentric)
potentially interesting, as I wrote before, I'm very cautious about
positing the possibility of continuity between the two.
S/he goes on to write:
'Your thinking is so 'modern' it is surprising you quote the
post-moderns so well. Try seeing Titus through other than the
Eurocentric 'meta-narrative.''
Again, there is a confusion here between Swaray and myself, but the
point is not amiss. What this position amounts to is an essentially
materialist (and, therefore, one might say modern) mapping of the play
which remains alert to the objections to an unqualified materialism
which might be raised along post-structuralist principles (Foucualt or
Derrida). Am I wrong to suggest that this is also Said's objective in
Orientalism, reworking poststructuralism for a materialist analysis,
arguably hegemonic? And is this not the principal difference between,
for example, Said and Homi Bhabha. Well, especially when we take on
Bhabha, my use of such highly theorized critical paradigms becomes
transparently colonizing anyway, and anything I might happen to say
therefore inevitably Eurocentric. C'est la vie.
But I think in Inman's last post, s/he has missed the point. What I'm
suggesting is the possibility of reading a Eurocentric meta-narrative
back to Titus, as opposed to reproducing it ignorantly. I make no
claims to understanding Islam or stepping outside of my own Eurocentric
perspective, but I am aware of my own culture's willed misperceptions of
Islam (many of which continue to serve economic imperialist ends), and
I'm curious to know where they begin, and if, when I pick up an edition
of Titus or see it in the theatre, a nascent form of that cultural bias
(diverse, heterogeneous, polymorphous) isn't obfuscated or concealed.
When I see video images of the now-dead Al'Zarqawi about to behead what
are to me familiar Western faces, I wonder if the Elizabethans shared in
the same fear and horror generated by experiencing, not a genuine
Muslim, but an early modern English theatrical representation of an
Orientalized other, bringing back the heads of Titus' mutilated sons.
And what I want to know is how and why such representations were
manipulated to generate such fear, and what ends that fear served to
justify and possibly continues to justify. Inman writes in an earlier
post, 'Shakespeare had a conception of the Muslim, but it was hardly a
realistic one. For the purposes of the study of Shakespeare, it is
important to reconstruct this spectral Muslim, but also remember its
distance from reality.' I couldn't agree more. In fact, I'm surprised
such qualifications need to be made at all, but I apologize now for not
making them. And in any case, I'm not trying to suggest any final
determinations on that possibility (standing at some impossible
Archimedean point outside my own Eurocentric bias, staking my claim like
Walter Raleigh on a 'new' critical landscape already peopled with
ancient inhabitants). Indeed, I share Larry Weiss' observations that
such claims about Aaron's use of language and acts of violence are
specious because all the characters (except the Christian clown) are, in
a sense, violent 'infidels' - the point's been made before.
Inman writes further:
'Much of what you are thinking about has already been discussed. Try
interacting with what has already been suggested.'
But what strikes me about the literature I've come across (and you'll
remember that my initial query was a call for direction towards relevant
sources, so criticism of my admitted ignorance seems inappropriate) is
the widespread reluctance, specifically, to see Aaron as an Orientalized
other in the context of Shakespeare's possible awareness of Islam
vis-