Inge Boer,
Disorienting Vision, rereading Stereotypes in French Orientalist Texts and
Images, Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York, 2004.
Inge Boer, a
scholar on Orientalism and its implications in cross-cultural,
postcolonial and gender studies, examined the role of the stereotypes in
the occidental construction of the Orient since the eighteenth century.
After Orientalism
(2003),
a collective book edited under her supervision was an updated account on
this question.
But I.Boer’s
most significant contribution to Orientalist studies is displayed in her
last book, Disorienting Vision, Rereading Stereotypes in French
Orientalist texts and Images
.
I. Boer follows Edouard Said’s leadership, yet critically revisits his
binary positions on the Orient as a pure construction of the occidental
preconceptions on the Arab world. The play in the title on the double
meaning of “dis-orienting” is significant of I.Boer’s critical approach of
Said’s and other orientalist critics.
I.Boer shows
through a rich variety of examples from high art to popular culture the
ambivalent interplay between occidental and oriental worlds. She
demonstrates that instead of producing obvious antagonism, the encounter
of the two cultures blur the frontiers between the two, the self and the
other, reality and fantasy, “location” and “space”. I.Boer scrutinizes in
Ingres’s, Delacroix,’s, Vanloo’s paintings as well as in Montesquieu’s
Les lettres persanes or Balzac’s La fille aux yeux d’or
stereotypes - such as the sultan’s despotism or the erotic fantasy about
seraglios. These stereotypes on the Orient are topoi where the two
cultures reflect each other and where the artist’s critical mind but also
his self-doubting insecurity and his unacknowledged fantasy are
ambivalently intertwined. By examining the effect of focalization
techniques in Delacroix’s La mort de Sardanapale, I. Boer shows how
the occidental point of view merges with the one of the murderer
Sardanapale and thus reverses the meaning of the cliché about violence.
She reveals the same reversal process in Les lettres persanes,
where the absence of the despot Usbek from his country engenders the
collapse of his seraglio and therefore of the occidental fantasy of it.
This re-reading
of the stereotypes on the Orient by I. Boer is anchored in an erudite
knowledge of the social history of occidental and oriental societies of
the time and is enriched by a relevant use of narrative, semiotic,
psychoanalytic theories.
This dual
epistemological approach makes Disorienting Vision a provocative
and stimulating book. By being cross-cultural in its subject and
interdiscplinary in its methods, I. Boer’s book is an apt reflection of
the cultural hybridity of oriental stereotypes.
Culturally and
theoretically, I. Boer’s book debates contemporary issues in as much as
her thought embraces the most updated fields of research and reveals a
historical weight on the occidental preconceptions of today on the Arab
world. The intellectual and political scope of I. Boer’s book has a
future.
Rachel Boué
