Colonialism and Culture Nicholas B. Dirks, Editor Ann Arbor THe University oF MICHIGAN PRESSqv JOS COS 1948 Copyright © by the University of Michigan 1992 All rights reserved Published in the United States of Ameria by The University of Michigan Press ‘Manufactured in the United States of America 1995 1994 1993 1992 43-21 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Date Colonialism and culture/Nicholas B. Dirks, editor . em.—(The Comparative studies in society and history book series) Tneludes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472.09434-3 (alk. paper).—ISBN 0-472-06434-7 (pbk, alk. paper) 1, Colonies—History. 2. Europe—Colonies—History: 3, Indigenous peoples—History. 4. Culture—History, 1. Dirks, Nicholas B., 1950-. IL Series. 3V305.C6S "1992 325" 3094-20 o2.33is cp So WEILL LIBRARY! BOSTON COLLFRE,Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order Timothy Mitchell It is no longer unusual to suggest that the construction of the colonial order is related to the elaboration of modern forms of representation and knowledge. The relationship has been most closely examined in the critique of Orientalism. The Western artistic and scholarly portrayal of the non-West, in Edward Said’s analysis, is not merely an ideological distortion convenient to an emergent global political order but a densely imbricated arrangement of imagery and expertise that organizes and produces the Orient as a political realty.' Three features define this Orientalist reality: it is understood as the product of unchanging racial or cultural essences; these essential characteristics are in each case the polar opposite of the West (passive rather than active, static rather than mobile, emotional rather than rational, chaotic rather than ordered); and the Oriental opposite or Other is, therefore, marked by a series of fun- damental absences (of movement, reason, order, meaning, and so on). In terms of these three features—essentialism, otherness, and absence— the colonial world can be mastered, and colonial mastery will, in turn, reinscribe and reinforce these defining features. Orientalism, however, has always been part of something larger. The nnineteenth-century image of the Orient was constructed not just in Ori- ental studies, romantic novels, and colonial administrations, but in all the new procedures with which Europeans began to organize the representa- tion of the world, from museums and world exhibitions to architecture, schooling, tourism, the fashion industry, and the commodification of everyday life. In 1889, to give an indication of the scale of these processes, 32 million people visited the Exposition Universelle, built that year in Paris to commemorate the centenary of the Revolution and to demonstrate French commercial and imperial power.* The consolidation 289