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How has postcolonial scholarship engaged with the problem of weapons? What are the possibilities and limitations of a postcolonial engagement with acute problems of weapons control? It is impossible for a subaltern scholar to address these broader ques-tions without taking note of the scant existing postcolonial literature on arms control and disarmament (Abraham, 1998; Biswas, 2014; Beier, 2002; Hecht, 2012; Mathur, 2014). This intellectual amnesia is noted by scholars especially with regard to the contri-butions of the Global South in addressing the problems of weapons control. This sense of erasure is reinforced by scholars perturbed by the decline in understanding of the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki(Taylor & Jacobs, 2015). On the contrary, there exists a growing circulation of civilizational discourses positing a dangerous dynamic of difference between ‘the “West and the Rest” as a civilizational mantra in arms control and disarma-ment’(Mathur, 2014, pp. 332–335). It is in this context that this paper makes an effort to problematize and juxtapose a spiraling ‘dynamic of denial’ and a persistent ‘dynamic of difference’ in the field of International Relations and weapons control. It tries to demon- strate the power of these discourses with reference to the memory and representation of Hiroshima. This paper introduces the concept of ‘techno-racism’ to bring attention to the complex interplay of racial and technological considerations in the everyday practices of arms control and disarmament. In developing the concept of ‘techno racism’ this paper draws upon the writings of scholars such as Michael Adas (1989), Gabrielle Hecht (2012), Roh, Huang, and Niu (2015). The concept of techno-racism has to be his- torically grounded to encourage careful deliberation on practices of racial reductionism and technological determinism with regard to weapons. The deployment of techno- racial discourses for political purposes can be traced from the late nineteenth century to the present with regard to weapons. The differences in weapons technology between different cultures is often reinforced with practices of racial reductionism constituting a contested hierarchy in the international order. The power of these techno- racial discourses emphasizing and de-emphasizing racial reductionism and technologi- cal determinism subject to political considerations respectively has an effect on the outcome of intersecting dynamics of difference and dynamic of denial in practices of arms control and disarmament. A growing intensity of racial reductionism and techno- logical determinism in discourses on difference and denial can generate destructive vio- lence. It is therefore pertinent to pay attention to the growing circulation of these powerful discourses in contemporary practices of security. Thus empowered with this succinct understanding of the concept of techno-racism, this paper begins by first exploring the ‘dynamic of difference’ with help of other scholars in International Relations with particular emphasis on consideration of technology as a significant ‘criteria for comparison’ between the Orient and the Occident (Adas, 1989). This is followed by an exploration of the circulating ‘dynamic of denial’ of the Global South’s contribution towards weapons regulation and prohibition and the responsibility of the West to meet its obligations under the existing Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). These intersecting dynamics of difference and dynamic of denial then help set the stage for remembering Hiroshima as the ‘techno-racial line’ between the West and the Rest. This helps produce critical reflections on the possibilities and limits of nuclear exceptionalism and nuclear allergy in addressing the problem of weapons. 

This paper tries to show how cross-cultural conflict often occurs between Japan and Westerners as the result of imposing one's own cultural meanings onto another culture. Interpretations of Japan, as well as other Asian cultures, often carries an implicit assumption that the West is rational (and superior) whereas the East is bound by ancient traditions (and is inferior). "Orientalism" has been identified as the particular form that Western stereotypical understandings of Asian cultures has taken. Intercultural communication becomes highly problematic as long as stereotypes are held and as long as the other culture is seen as foreign and wholly other. By transcending this "Orientalism" we will be in a better position to understand and communicate with those from another culture without having to set up a dichotomous boundary between "us" and "them." Conflict with Japan is focused on 1) because there seems to be a lot of it, and 2) because Japan represents a unique culture field which is, in some ways, both modern and familiar, yet in other ways seemingly [being] foreign to Western interpretive structures. This paper will call into question some of the stereotypes that Westerners often project onto Japan as being a monolithic culture which is excessively authoritarian, hierarchical, and patriarchal. We will try to offer some other interpretive options for understanding a culture which has suffered from intercultural communication problems for so long.

Gusterson suggests that this was facilitated with the deployment of ‘subtle orien- talist ideologies’ by the West in an effort to essentialize the Otherness of the Third World vis-a`-vis the West.96 Furthermore, the West sought to represent itself as a col- lective ideological front that: (1) makes the simultaneous ownership of nuclear weapons by the major powers and the absence of nuclear weapons in the Third World seem natural and reasonable while problematizing attempts by such countries as India, Pakistan, and Iraq to acquire these weapons; (2) it presents the security needs of the established nuclear powers as if they were everybody’s; (3) it effaces the con- tinuity between Third World countries’ nuclear deprivation and other systema- tic patterns of deprivation in the underdeveloped world in order to inhibit a massive North-South confrontation; and (4) it legitimates the nuclear monopoly of the recognized nuclear powers.97 The struggle for legitimacy to acquire nuclear weapons is fought further on the grounds that: (1) Third World countries are too poor to afford nuclear weapons; (2) deter- rence will be unstable in the Third World; (3) Third World regimes lack the technical maturity to be trusted with nuclear weapons; and (4) Third World regimes lack the political maturity to be trusted with nuclear weapons.98 In this struggle for legitimacy, ‘the claim to rational decision-making is fre- quently used by great powers to justify the possession of nuclear weapons. Conver- sely, the purported lack of rationality, on the part of other states, particularly revolutionary regimes like Cuba or Iran, is routinely invoked to explain why they cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons’.99 The existing literature on arms control and disarmament is replete with rhetorical polarizations that depict the West as the trustworthy and responsible actor that needs to police the rebellious and recalcitrant Third World that is not up to the task, whose science and technology is not even capable of addressing their basic population and food problems and is constantly seeking attention. All these ‘recurrent images and metaphors . . . pertain in some way to disorder’.100 It is possible to launch recursive arguments on each of these invocations but the significance of these ‘distorted representations of the Other’ is that they also disclose the West’s ‘buried, denied, and troubling parts that have mysteriously surfaced’.101 The West reiterates the same arguments with regard to poverty, instability, and 346 CONTEMPORARY SECURITY POLICY lack of technical and political maturity that it had deployed in the late 19th and early 20th century to prevent the acquisition of weapons by the colonies. This rhetoric dis- plays a persistent sense of fear and vulnerability that ‘[i]n any contest in which one side is bound by the norms of civilized behaviour and the other is not, history is, alas, on the side of the barbarians’.102 This suggests that arms control and disarmament are practices to facilitate binding the barbarians by particular norms of civilized behav- iour. It is therefore not enough to undertake an exposition of how norms as standards of civilization are constituted in arms control and disarmament. It is equally pertinent to express concern about how particular norms of behaviour are deployed to civilize/ discipline others.

The focus of all the editorials revolved around the United States’s responsibility to fight the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran. The editorials attempted to show that Iran had violated its international obligations under the NPT. The two themes of Oriental untrustworthiness and Islam as threat appear to function as the ideological underpinning of this construction of us versus them. Whereas it downplays or denies Iran’s right to all nuclear technology applicable to peaceful purposes, a most central tenet of the NPT was left outside the editorials’discourse:nuclear disarmament. Under the terms of the NPT, the five original nuclear powers, who are parties to the NPT, were permitted to keep their nuclear arsenal but pledged to negotiate “in good faith”the end of the nuclear arms race and the elimination of their nuclear arsenals in return for other nations not seeking nuclear weapons (IAEA, n.d., pp. 1, 4). As stated by the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy (2005b), 35 years after the adoption of the NPT, the nuclear weapon states have failed to live up to their part of the treaty: [They] cynically [interpret] the NPT as a mechanism for the permanent maintenance of an international system of nuclear apartheid in which only they can possess nuclear weapons....Now the Bush administration wants to add a second tier to its nuclear double standard by denying uranium enrichment—needed for both nuclear power and weapons—to countries which don’t already have it. Today, the United States is spending about $40 billion annually on nuclear weapons. U.S. nuclear weapons spending has grown by 84% since 1995. The United States was to spend about $7 billion in 2005 to maintain and modernize nuclear war- heads, excluding the billions of dollars it will spend to operate and modernize its delivery and command and control systems. The U.S. arsenal has 10,000 nuclear warheads, and some 2,000 on “hair-trigger alert,”each one many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Institute for Public Accuracy, 2005a) The New York Times reported on February 7,2005,that the Bush administration has “begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives”(Broad, 2005, p. A1). Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn criticized the administration’s decision,saying that the United States has not set a good example for nuclear nonproliferation (Agence France-Presse, 2005). El Baradei has also criticized the U.S. nuclear policy (Giacomo, 2003). “The U.S. government demands that other nations not possess nuclear weapons; meanwhile, it is arming itself....In truth there are no good or bad nuclear weapons. If we do not stop applying double standards, we will end up with more nuclear weapons,”El Baradei said. Writing in the editorial section of The Washington Post, former President Jimmy Carter (2005) criticized the nuclear powers for refusing to meet their NPT nuclear disarmament commitments. He argues, The United States is the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including anti-ballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating “bunker buster”and perhaps some new “small”bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. (p. A17) Whereas Iran’s alleged violation of its commitments under the NPT is important, the failure of the United States and the other nuclear weapon states to follow through on their promise to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons is not deemed worthy of discussion. Conclusion This study supports Karim (2000) and McAlister’s (2001) findings that, today, Orientalist depictions of Muslim countries and their political issues concentrate around the idea that Islam is a source of threat. This study also finds that in the case of Iran’s nuclear program, the issue of trust plays a more central role than the actual existence of evidence for Iran’s possession of a clandestine nuclear weapons program. The present critical discourse analysis also reveals how the three elite newspapers ’editorials selectively framed the issues surrounding the Iranian nuclear dispute by employing linguistic, stylistic, and argumentative maneuvers. Despite their differences in their policy recommendations, none challenged the underlying assumptions that Iran has a clandestine nuclear weapons program,that the Islamic nature of its government is a threat, and that it should not be trusted with sensitive nuclear technology. Their inattention to the inconsistent nonproliferation policies of the United States and other European nuclear powers shows the limits of media criticism of official policies

In a recent edition of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan pose the rhetorical question: why is there no non-Western international relations theory(IRT)? They argue that almost all IRT ‘‘is produced by and for the West, and rests on an assumption that western history is world history.’’ They conclude that ‘‘if we are to improve IRT as a whole, then the Western IRT needs to be challenged not just from within, but also from outside the West’’ (Acharya and Buzan 2007a:289). This article is based on the premise 1This is a substantially revised and edited version of a paper presented on the panel on ‘‘Thinking Past Western IR: Islamic Perspectives on the World Order’’ at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, Chicago, Illinois, February 28, 2007. I thank Mustapha Kamal Pasha for the invitation to present on the panel and for his constructive and insightful comments. Also, I wish to thank Andrei Tsygankov and J. Ann Tickner for the invitation to submit my paper to the Special Issue. Many of the themes explored in this article appear in Shani (2005, 2007a). that critical International Relations (critical IR) theory, by examining the origins, development, and potential transformation of the bounded territorial state, has created space within the discipline for the articulation of challenges from outside the West.2 However, the secular Eurocentric historicism deployed by most critical theorists places limits on the degree to which transnational non-western actors can fully participate in ‘‘critical’’ international politics (Shani 2007a). Agenuinely ‘‘post-western’’ critical international theorywould interrogatenot only the positivist methodology of IR but also the concomitant assumptions of western cultural distinctiveness and superiority which are constitutive of the discipline(Krishna 1993; Tickner 2003; Pasha 2005; Hobson 2007; Hutchings 2007; Shani 2007a). Most attempts to do so from a ‘‘postcolonial’’ perspective,3 how- ever, have ended up reproducing the very hegemony they set out to critique.4 Indeed, it has been argued that postcolonialism is incapable of challenging the Eurocentric premises of western IR since it is framed within cultural discourses emanating from the West (Acharya and Buzan 2007a:307). This begs the ques- tion as to whether it is indeed possible to ‘‘move beyond the West’’ (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004). After five centuries of European imperialism, Western thought is now, as Chakrabarty concludes, ‘‘a gift to us all’’ (Chakrabarty 2000:255); its ‘‘thick’’ values have long since become the ‘‘thin’’ values of ‘‘international society.’’ For, as Bull and Watson (1984:433) noted a quarter of a century ago, ‘‘the most striking feature of...global international society...is the extent to which the states of Asia and Africa have embraced such basic elements of Euro- pean international society as the sovereign state, the rules of international law, the procedures and conventions of diplomacy and IR.’’Such a reading of world history serves to reproduce the Eurocentric underpinnings and reinforce the hegemony of the West within IR, silencing subaltern and non-western voices. Non-western peoples did not ‘‘embrace the basic elements of European international society’’ out of their own volition but were forced to do so. The sovereign states-system was itself a legacy of colonialism: a rejection of European principles, norms and values would have led to the permanent exclu- sion of the colonized world from ‘‘international society.’’ Contra Buzan and Acharya, it is argued that the ontological premises of western IRT need to be rethought not merely ‘‘enriched by the addition of new voices’’ from the global South (Acharya and Buzan 2007b:427–428). Their reduction of Asian non- western IR to the level of the ‘‘pre-theoretical,’’ and their seemingly uncritical acceptance of the territorialized nation-state as the basic unit of any IRT, rein- forces the Orientalism (Said 1978) and ‘‘provincialism’’ of Western IR. If, as they claim, ‘‘Western IRT has not only built the stage and written the play, but also defined and institutionalized the audience for IR and IRT’’ (Acharya and Buzan 2007b:436; -emphasis mine), then it is no wonder that non-western approaches to IR are seen as mere ‘‘mimicry’’ (Bhabha 1994; Bilgin 2008) of western dis- courses or as ‘‘local variations’’ of western ideas which have acquired ‘‘theoreti- cal’’ status in the academy.

In The Yellow Danger, Yen How appropriates the classical imperial strategy of ‘divide and conquer’ as the first step of China’s world conquest. He creates a considerable amount of mutual suspicion and infighting among the European empires by suddenly granting more territorial concessions to France, Germany and Russia but not to Britain. With a looming ‘financial panic’ in the country, Britain decides that ‘the idea that England should submit to such a conspiracy’ has to be ‘scouted with indignation’, and a war with France ensues.40 The imagination of these disastrous events shows that Shiel was concerned about the continuance of English supremacy over the other European powers in their fin-de-siècle ‘Scramble for China’, which is ironic since just two years after the publication of the novel, the major European countries would achieve an unprecedented degree of solidarity in The Eight- Nation Alliance’s invasion of China.41 It is therefore easy to see that the Yellow Peril discourse for Shiel is more of a warning for England and Europe than any accurate depiction of the political reality of China. The same can be said about ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’ as London insists on the danger of a potential Sino-Japanese alliance against ‘white-skinned people’ while totally ignoring the recent wars and ongoing tensions between the two countries.42 Such textual prioritization of self-concern over the concrete geopolitical situation of the Other makes their Yellow Perilism quintessential cases of Edward Said’s Orientalism. As Said states, ‘the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture. . . ’.43 For Shiel and London, the political reality of the Yellow Peril does not really matter. What matters is the discursive function it serves for their own socio-political agenda–to ‘justify their current prejudices and fears’ and ‘boost their own sense of cohesion’.44 

This 1999 high profile case did not only call attention to the greater number of racial profiling cases against Chinese American scientists in the period that preceded Lee’s arrest and that had remained largely invisible until then. It also helped crystallize in the popular imagination the racial trope of the Chinese “scientist-as-spy”—quite resonant of the “evil criminal genius” of the fictional character Dr. Fu Manchu—and made visible the targeted criminalization of this highly educated class of ethnic Chinese scientists and engineers. This trope and its consequential effects on racial profiling make explicit that educational-scientific achievement does not automatically translate into national acceptance or belonging. It exposes the falsehood of meritocracy that undergirds the American dream. Race and ethnicity—in this case, being ethnic Chinese/racially Asian—renders people suspect in all aspects of national security. As Andrew Kim, an attorney in Houston, asserts, “In the same way racial profiling African American as criminals may create the crime of ‘driving while black,’ profiling of Asian Americans as spies . . . may be creating a new crime: ‘researching while Asian.’ Emerging from the context of the U.S.-China trade war, the 2019 targeted crackdown of Chinese American scientists certainly can be perceived as part and parcel of the Trump administration’s comprehensive plan to cripple China’s global economic advance. These specific attacks against individual scientists aim to stamp out China’s alleged practices in acquiring/extracting intellectual property—both scientific and technological—of U.S.-based researchers, the kind of intellectual property that could be commoditized and entered into the calculus of economic trade. Indeed, the fear of scientific espionage is fueled by the fear of loss of economic competition. In a global market driven by scientific-technological innovation, it is the potential loss of the commoditization of science and technology in the race for control of global market shares that drives this “witch hunt” for possible intellectual property theft and Chinese scientific espionage.

Very little of the scholarship generated by Said’s classic work has dealt with war and violent conflict. Yet, war has always been fundamental to Orientalist discourses. Indeed, the very idea of the West, along with its History, is born in Orientalist war. Herodotus elaborated a vision of the Greeks through contrast with the Persian Empire they fought.15 Back then, of course, the Greeks were the weaker party, fighting for their existence on an imperial periphery. A long line of scholars and political and military commentators, not to mention Hollywood, have twisted Herodotus‟ plural readings of the Other into Orientalism: the Persians as a multitudinous mass who threatened to overwhelm the Greeks; their lack of individuality and „freedom‟; their hierarchical social and political arrangements; their indolence and sensuality; their capacity for, indeed enjoyment of, unreasoning, passionate violence, and so on.16 Orientalism subsequently has been marked by this extremism, and by this fear, even as the poles of power shifted to favor the putative West of the day. The renaissance recoveries of Greek and Roman texts, and their subsequent employment in Orientalisms of diverse kind, took place in a Europe poised to begin its modern rise to world dominance. The birth of Orientalist traditions in a context of Western weakness and existential crisis, but subsequently flowering in one of strength and dominance marks also the American experience. Outnumbered and threatened by Indians at the beginning, Puritan Indian hating became basic to the Frontier, the American West, and beyond to the ground wars in Asia.17 There is a tension between such an unstable realm as war and the rigid identity constructions of a totalizing Orientalism, a tension evinced in the fraught and extremist character of its representations of war. Events at the war front can resist Orientalist representations, and conspire to set limits on and expose contradictions in them. Here is where the space is created for debates, contestations and crises at home. Things can and sometimes do turn out much differently than expected. The shocks and surprises of war are stark reminders of the contingencies of political military histories. At the same time, the identity of the Westerner is intimately bound up with constructions of Orientalized others. In order for Americans to “liberate” Iraq, and hence conceive themselves as liberators, Iraqis must desire liberation. For Americans, this is not misperception but a form of identity politics. To conceive the Iraqis differently, say as a people who regard the US as a violent and unpredictable imperial overlord allied with Zionist interests, requires abandoning the notion that Americans are liberators. That is, it requires abandoning a cherished and precious element of American self-understanding. Such a reversal marked the crises generated in American society by the Vietnam War. Many Americans eventually did come to see the US as a murderous imperial aggressor in Vietnam, in part in and through media representations of the war. Events at the front entangled narratives of Self and Other at home, for elites and publics. An example of these processes is provided by a report filed by Morley Safer for CBS in August 1965 concerning a search and destroy mission conducted by US marines near Danang.18 Unlike most news coverage of US forces in Vietnam at this time, Safer reported on the systematic burning down of a village. Crucially accompanied by film footage broadcast on national television, the report showed marines rousting Vietnamese villagers, young and old, at bayonet point and setting fire to their homes. As Thomas Engelhardt realizes, this report was a flaming arrow headed for the heart of the Frontier narrative, reversing it. It was not the Indians who were now burning down the log cabin, the fort, or the settlement, inflicting pain and suffering on innocent inhabitants, but Americans. CBS‟ switchboard was deluged with calls from outraged viewers when the report aired. President Johnson called the president of CBS to complain (“Frank, are you trying to fuck me?”) and refused to accept the camera footage was real, believing Safer had bribed a marine officer to get the shots he wanted (“They got to one of our boys”). Johnson urged that Safer be investigated, and his staff had the FBI, CIA, and finally the Royal Canadian Mounted Police look at Safer. Informed that Safer was a Canadian, not a communist, Johnson commented, “Well, I knew he wasn‟t an American.”

As early as the 19th century, European colonial states established a direct link between the state and educational system in order to use the social sciences for their own benefit and further exploit and colonialize Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. As a result of the economic needs driven by European industrialization, colonial states began to support and finance social science fields such as history and anthropology in order to study colonized regions and design a comprehensive foreign policy vis a vis ethnicities, religions, cultures, traditions, and social structures. We can trace the complicated relationship between Western colonialism and imperialism and the Western educational system to the 18th century. Edward Said describes this colonialist knowledge production and criticizes the motivations driving Middle East and Islamic studies in Western academia, especially in the postcolonial period. He understood the real impetus behind Orientalism as non-academic, but instead policy-oriented with the objective of further colonialism and imperialism. For example, anthropology was established as an academic field not because some people in Europe were really interested in other cultures, but due to an interest in studying other cultures and societies for the purpose of further exploitation. As a result, most of the early anthropologists were supported and financed by the French and British state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Yet, Orientalism isvery much tied to the tumultuous dynamics of con- temporary history. I emphasize in it accordingly that neither the term Orient nor theconcept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort,partly affirmation,partly identification of the Other. That these supreme fictions lend themselves easily to manipulationand the organization of collective passion has never been more evident than in our time,whenthe mobilization of fear, hatred, disgust andresurgent self-pride and arrogance— much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side, ‘we’ Westerners on the other— arevery large-scale enterprises.Orientalism’s first page opens with a 1975 description of the Lebanese Civil War that ended in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of human blood continues up to this minute. We have had the failure of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak of the second intifada, and the awful suffering of the Palestinians on the reinvaded West Bank and Gaza, with Israeli F-16s and Apache helicopters used routinely on defenceless civilians as part of their collective punishment. The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. As I write these lines, the illegal and unsanctioned imperial occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States proceeds, with resulting physical ravagement and political unrest that is truly awful to contemplate. This is all part of what is supposed to be a clash of civilizations, unending, implacable, irremediable. Nevertheless, I think not. I wish I could say, however, that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn’t.For all kinds of reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be considerably better. In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tighten- ing of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliche ́ , the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and ‘others’ has found a fitting correlative in the looting, pillaging and destruction of Iraq’s libraries and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that ‘we’ might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and else- where speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the ‘Orient’, that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century has been made and re-made countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orient’s nature, and we must deal with it accordingly. In the process the uncountable sediments of his- tory, that include innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad’s libraries and museums. My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that ‘our’ East, ‘our’ Orient becomes ‘ours’ to possess and direct. I should say again that I have no ‘real’ Orient to argue for. I do, however, have a very high regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to be.There has been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim for their backwardness, lack of demo- cracy, and abrogation of women’s rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and democracy areby nomeans simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find like Easter eggs in the living-room. The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no live notion (or any knowledge at all of the language of what real people actually speak) has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American power to construct there an ersatz model of free market ‘democracy’, without even a trace of doubt that such projects don’t exist outside of Swift’s Academy of Lagado.

Twenty-five years after Orientalism was published, questions remain about whether modern imperialism ever ended or whether it has continued in the Orient since Napoleon’s entry into Egypt two centuries ago. Arabs and Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the depreda- tions of empire is only a way of evading responsibility in the present. You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modern Orientalist. This of course is also V. S. Naipaul’s contribution to literature, that the victims of empire wail on while their country goes to the dogs. But what a shallow calculation of the imperial intrusion that is, how summarily it scants the immense distortion introduced by the empire into the lives of ‘lesser’ peoples and ‘subject races’ generation after generation, how little it wishes to face the long succession of years through which empire continues to work its way in the lives say of Palestinians or Congolese or Algerians or Iraqis. We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do? Think of the line that starts with Napoleon, continues with the rise of Oriental studies and the take over of North Africa, and goes on in similar undertakings in Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and, during the entire twentieth century in the struggle over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Then think contrapuntally of the rise of anti- colonial nationalism, through the short period of liberal independence, the era of military coups, of insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, irrational struggle and uncompromising brutality against the latest bunch of ‘natives’. Each of these phases and eras produces its own distorted knowledge of the other, each its own reductive images, its own disputatious polemics. My intellectual approach has been to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent collective identity rather than understanding and intellectual exchange. I have called what I try to do ‘humanism’, a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake’s mind-forged manacles so as to be able to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. Moreover humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist. This is to say that every domain is linked to every other one, and that nothing that goes on in our world has ever been isolated and pure of any outside influence. The disheartening part is that the more the critical study of culture shows us that that is the case, the less influence such a view seems to have, and the more territory reductive polarizations like ‘Islam vs. the West’ seem to conquer. For those of us who by force of circumstance actually live the pluri- cultural life as it entails Islam and the West, I have long felt that a special intellectual and moral responsibility attaches to what we do as scholars and intellectuals. Certainly I think it is incumbent upon us to complicate and/or dismantle the reductive formulae and the abstract but potent kind of thought that leads the mind away from concrete human history and experi- ence and into the realms of ideological fiction, metaphysical confrontation, and collective passion. This is not to say that we cannot speak about issues of injustice and suffering, but that we need to do so always within a context that is amply situated in history, culture, and socio-economic reality. Our role is to widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority.I have spent a great deal of my life during the past thirty-five years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones based on mutual hostility that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long. Let me now speak about a different alternative model that has been extremely important to me in my work. As a humanist whose field is literature, I am old enough to have been trained forty years ago in the field of comparative literature, whose leading ideas go back to Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before that I must men- tion the supremely creative contribution of Giambattista Vico, the Neo- politan philosopher and philologist whose ideas anticipate and later infiltrate the line of German thinkers I am about to cite. They belong to the era of Herder and Wolf, later to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally the great twentieth century Romance philologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius. To young people of the current generation the very idea of philology suggests something impossibly antiquarian and musty, but philology in fact is the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. It is exemplified for me most admirably in Goethe’s interest in Islam generally, and Hafiz in particular, a consuming passion which led to the composition of the West-o ̈stlicher Diwan, and it inflected Goethe’s later ideas about Weltliteratur, the study of all the literatures of the world as a symphonic whole which could be apprehended theoretically as having preserved the individuality of each work without losing sight of the whole.

Primitivization of knowledge in U.S. think tanks and the cor- •poratization of American universities are both coterminous with this development that I identify as epistemic endosmosis, in the sense that when we see a book written by someone like Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, while employed at the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, or another by Ray Takeyh, while a professor of national security studies at the National War College, or a professor and director of studies at the Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, or else a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, then the knowledge that these gentlemen and their respective books and articles (they have recently started in fact writing joint articles) produce about Shi'ism or Iran, while both employed by the U.S. military, through a process of endosmosis flows through the membrane of their PR firms and mass media access into the currents of public at large and helps in the social construction of reality about Islam, Iran, "the Middle East," and if need be about Somalia, North Korea, Venezuela—anywhere that the U.S. military may need to engage in psychological operations at both the home front and on the battle zones. What we have witnessed in the famous case when the U.S. military commissioned a series of articles favorable to the U.S. military occupation of Iraq written by a PR firm in Washington DC, then translated into Arabic and placed in newspapers in Iraq9 is only a slightly exaggerated case of what Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and Ray Takeyh are doing in the United States. The epistemic endosmosis that I suggest as the most recent phase of knowledge production about the Middle East is not limited to the bizarre condition in which the U.S. military (through Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and Ray Takeyh) produces knowledge and disseminates it as psych-op for general public consumption—effectively changing the critical discourse away from the U.S. responsibility for the mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq and blaming it on medieval sectarian hostilities among the natives. In this phase we have entered a mode of knowledge production that is no longer predicated on a particular manner of subject-formation (the study of "the Orient" cross-generated "the West" as the sovereign and knowing subject of history). Here such diverse figures as Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Fouad Ajami, Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie, Pope Benedict VI, Prime Minister Tony Blair, President George W. Bush, Michael Ignatieff and the entire discourse of human rights, Allan Dershowitz and the Zionist propaganda machinery, Azar Nafisi and her brand of women's rights, the Danish cartoonist of Jyllands-Posten, the comic books of Frank Miller and the cinema of Zach Snyder, the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and the expansive Islamophobia she represented are all integral to an amorphous manner of public knowledge production about Islam and "the Middle East" through a miasmatic spectrum that is not integral to any paradigmatic or epistemic formation. These modes of knowledge production about Islam or "the Middle East" are infinitely more popular, politically more potent, and socially far more formative of opinions, judgments, and even votes in democratic contexts than libraries full of detailed research conducted by qualified and responsible scholars. The thing that holds these people together is neither an epistemic cohesion, nor a paradigmatic modality, and certainly not a conspiracy to deceive and misinform. There is indeed a grain of truth in much of what people like Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji or Ibn Warraq or Azar Nafisi say—a grain of truth wrapped inside insidious falsities at the service of mass deception—or a "noble lie" as Leo Strauss's version of Plato would say. These creatures of media and PR firms are competing with each other to grab a larger share of the public attention via a mode of knowledge production that is categorically miasmatic in its sentiments, spontaneous in its marketability, and above all disposable in the emotive universe it engenders. As such they address themselves neither to a specific audience, nor are they conducive to an integrated mode of subject formation. In manufacturing public consent, they are spontaneous and disposable—convincing in their self-fulfilling prophecies today, discarded for the next round of the U.S. military adventurism tomorrow.

This historical genealogy and epistemic analytic are both absolutely crucial if we are not to fetishize the question concerning colonialism, formulate a historically more nuanced conception of it, so that today we might have a better grasp of the varied and amorphous modes of knowledge production about Islam and "the middle East," and in fact see it, as I propose, as a case of epistemic endosmosis, in which the aggressive formation of a field of public knowledge about Islam and "the Middle East" is no longer conducive to the reversed formation of a sovereign (European or American) and all-knowing (Kantian) subject. My ultimate proposal here is that today in fact we are witnessing a mode of knowledge that is devoid of agential subjectness, which is the modus operandi of an empire without hegemony. This epistemic endosmosis—interested knowledge manufactured in think tanks and percolating into the public domain—I propose is conducive to various manners of disposable knowledge production—predicated on no enduring or legitimate episteme, but in fact modeled on non-refundable commodities that provide instant gratification and are then disposed of after one use only. This is fast-knowledge produced on the model of fast food, with plastic cups, plastic knives, plastic forks, and hopefully biodegradable paper that can be recycled for environmental purposes. The origin and function of this mode of knowledge are compatible with the imperial imaginary they serve, for the problem of knowledge production in an age of empire will have to begin with the political provenance of that empire, the U.S. empire, and the postmodern predicament of its illusion of sovereignty, legitimacy, and authority. The power at the military roots of the conception of empire that enables any mode of knowledge production will have to be broken down, in the idiomaticity of its American English, into the distance between potenza and potere, when Agamben begins to speak Italian to it, between puissance andpouvoir, when Foucault begins to speak French, or Macht and Vermogen when Heidegger begins to speak German to it. The Latin root of the distance between potentia mdpotestas, between power in a diffused and amorphous state, and power as centralized, authenticated, and legitimized, is what is perhaps deliberately lost to "power" when George W. Bush claims it in his American English. My contention here is that as much as power as potere, pouvoir, Vermogen, andpotestas was conducive to the formation of a knowing and sovereign European subject, power as potenza, puissance, Macht, and potentia entirely lacks and perhaps has forever lost the ability to constitute agential autonomy for the knowing and sovereign subject (European or otherwise) who thus seeks to claim it. Immanuel Kant, in other words, was the very last metaphysician of the (European) sovereign subject—the omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient narrator of history. The classical period of Orientalism, namely Orientalism as the intelligence arm of colonialism, corresponded to that absolute sovereignty of the European knowing subject, as mercenary armies of Orientalists went around the world and defined it in the form of a knowledge that can be known, owned, and governed at one and the same time. That mode of knowledge production along with the sovereign subject that produced it have long since ceased to exist, and upon us is the age of homo sacer, nuda vita (naked life), state of exception, dispersion of refugees between mere humans and would-be citizens, language as hypertrophy, and gestures as pure means with no end. The knowledge that corresponds to this state of exception as imperial rule is the knowledge by endosmosis, the knowledge of nothing, knowledge without agency, at the service of an empire with no hegemony.

Those not familiar with the term “discourse” often ask: Is everything discourse? Where is the boundary between discourse and the material (touchable and observable) world? Discourse scholars answer this question by stating that discourse is the space where human beings make sense of the material world, where they attach meaning to the world and where representations of the world become manifest. The existence of a material world outside discourse is, thus, not denied—what is refuted is the assumption that we can relate to this material world without discourse (Holzscheiter 2010). In its essence, discourse analysis is an engagement with meaning and the linguistic and communicative processes through which social reality is constructed. Discourse can therefore be defined as, basically, the space where intersubjective meaning is created, sustained, trans- formed and, accordingly, becomes constitutive of social reality. This preliminary and broad understanding of discourse already allows distinguishing discourse from language inasmuch as discourse is an inherently social concept. Rather than simply investigating the use of language in international politics, an explo- ration of discourse asks for the social and political effects that result from using a particular vocabulary on the one hand and the productive effects of particular constructions of reality on the agency and identity of individuals and groups. Any singular event of speaking or producing text, thus, is part of a larger social and political process: It is conceived of as “text in social context.”                      

There are two things to note from the above discussion. First, that the forms of colonial dispossession, conquest and discovery through which Europe variously annexed its territorial colonies, were in fact enabled by Orientalising ways of seeing the non-west. In other words, cultural representations of the non-west, the Orient, were never far from power. It was precisely the ability of the west to authoritatively represent the peoples and places of the east as at one and the same time passive, exotic, undeveloped, barbaric and alluring, that laid the foundation for contact, dispossession and colonial rule by imperial powers. Just as there is a vast tradition of 18thand 19th-century European Orientalist painters (Figure 1), novelists and mapmakers, it is significant that there is no similar South Asian, African or Middle Eastern artistic or literary tradition of representing Europe. With Orientalism, power flows one way. Second, Said’s whole thesis is profoundly geographical, and for geography educators the opening pages of Orientalism should be of especial interest. As Said wrote: We must take seriously [the] … great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities – to say nothing of historical entities – such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are man-made. (Said, 1978, pp. 4–5) To use Orientalism to begin to think postcolonially, therefore, is to begin to think geographically (Blunt and McEwan, 2002). Despite its birth in literary studies, postcolonialism is an inherently geographical mode of thought. It encourages us to consider the ways we think about distant and different elsewheres, the connections familiar from globalisation, immigration or cultural hybridity, and the western and imperial origins of the spaces and places we take for granted. Thinking postcolonially is to critically probe our own geographical imaginations (Gregory, 1994).

As will quickly become evident, by “Sinology” and the “Sinological” I refer to more than the original China-centered field within the older orientalism (going back at least to the early 1700s), and more than the specialized area studies instituted across the U.S.-West after the revolution of 1949. Note, however, that there is no such thing as “China studies” within China. This is part of my point in seeing the production of knowledge about China, even today, as being awfully similar to the older, more obviously orientalist mode. While specialized work, particularly within the social sciences and politics, occupies much of my attention, I also use texts from film studies, literature, journalism, and current “theory.” In doing so I mean to follow Adorno: his oft-stated desire to write books that are constellations that make unlike things alike. But I also rely on Foucault’s idea that the things that make up a discourse are dispersed across the social field, yet combine to form a common unit that has regularized “statements” and effects of power. This combination is Foucault’s inescapable gesture to the totality or interdisciplinarity. The China field is in this sense an expanded and expansive one. In the texts I examine in this book there emerges a common statement: China is becoming-the-same as the liberal and modern West (howsoever haltingly), or it must and should and will do so; this is the chief statement of the new orientalism. This can, in turn, be seen as emerging from other, related discursive themes: that China is becoming democratic, normal, civil, creative– artistic (avant-garde), liberal, and so on; that it still lacks something (often the same items); that its Maoist, revolutionary past is something either in the dustbin of history or must still be overcome. But “statement” here should be understood in the Foucaultian sense: it is at times more or less explicit (as in a speech act), but more often implied or signified indirectly and even non-linguistically. We must emphasize the rhetorical, discursive function of the statement – less the exact words, more its status as authorized “knowledge.”13 These are things that can be signified as easily by the newscaster as by the specialist, and likewise for the more popular “China Watching” cultural producer and citizen. This last aspect speaks to more than just the fact that area specialists and journalists often overlap and write cross-over – or identical – texts. (The journalistic quality of much China studies can indeed be striking to observers of the discipline.) It speaks to the fact that, as one Chinese Marxist might have put it, correct and incorrect ideas come from multiple places; this is what makes them the ruling discourses and difficult to change. The idea and knowledges of China we have do not stem only from specialists and the rarefied realms of Truth. This is why the critique of Sinological discourse has to engage demography as much as film studies, creative texts as much as “scientific” ones. Much of what I am saying here about how the China field cannot be delimited in the traditional, gate-keeping way has been better said by Aziz Al-Azmeh, whose critiques of orientalism should be much more widely known. Pointing to shared conceptions of Islam in specialized and popular texts alike, he states: We are not talking of two separate types and domains of knowledge about Islam, one for the scholarly elect and another for the rude masses, but of the coexistence within orientalism of two substantially concordant registers, one of which – the scholarly – has greater access to observation .. . and which looks all the more abject for this... . Regardless of access to real or specious facts, facts are always constructed and their construction is invariably culture-specific. Orientalist scholarship is a cultural mood born of mythological classificatory lore, a visceral, savage division of the world, much like such partisanship as animates support for football clubs. (Islams 127–8) Certainly I do not quite mean to say “As for Islam so too for China and the P.R.C.,” since China’s relationship to imperialism has its own historical specificity, as does the largely American, Cold War-inflected modern China studies field. Some will argue that since China was never “really” colonized and is so much older and “intact,” orientalism is a non-starter. (More on this below.) Nonetheless, the preponderance of textual and political evidence is on the postor anti-colonial side; at least the present study seeks to make this case. Moreover, it is not an exaggeration to say that China and Islam share a certain, discursive history in Western intellectual–political culture, as does virtually every national culture subjected to the forces and significations of imperialism and modern colonialism. If we cannot make connections – even at the level of theory – between the West’s China and the West’s Islam, then we cannot speak of a global history of colonialism and its aftermaths. And of course one cannot deny the import of modern colonialism within Western intellectual–political culture (the dominant knowledge producers). In this sense, then: for “Islam” read “China.” 

But Orientalism, as a symbolic revolt, was not just about the critique, deconstruction and exposure of ideological and epistemological Eurocentric frameworks that monopolised the realm of discursive production. Appropriating Michel Foucault’s postulation that power is everywhere and that it is diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and “regimes of truth”, Said presents the second mode of critique; namely, Orientalism as the ontological nature, structure and a priori condition of power. In this sense, knowledge or the historical materialisation of specific Nietzschean truths were a form of power and power could only be deciphered through critiquing its manufactured meta-narrative and mapping out the transmutation and movement of its anthropomorphisms, metaphors and metonymies. Said demonstrates this through examining Sylvester de Sacy’s role in the Dacier Report (1802). Conducted for examining the state of Orientalist learning, the report was commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte. Said writes: The importance of the Tableau historique for an understanding of Orientalism’s inaugural phase is that it exteriorizes the form of Orientalist knowledge and its features, as it also describes the Orientalist’s relationship to his subject matter. In Sacy’s pages on Orientalism … he speaks of his own work as having uncovered, brought to light, rescued a vast amount of obscure matter. Why? In order to place it before the student. For like all his learned contemporaries Sacy considered a learned work a positive addition to an edifice that all scholars erected together. Knowledge was essentially the making visible of material, and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of Benthamite panopticon. Scholarly discipline was therefore a specific technology of power …(1978, 127).3 Elsewhere in his analysis of Arthur James Balfour’s speech in the House of Commons on the 13 June 1910, Said declares: England knows Egypt; Egypt is what England knows; England knows that Egypt cannot have self-government; England confirms that by occupying Egypt; for the Egyptians, Egypt is what England has occupied and now governs; foreign occupation therefore becomes “the very basis” of contemporary Egyptian civilization; Egypt requires, indeed, insists upon British occupation (1978, 34). In other words, Said postulated that Orientalism exuded epistemic violence through its inherent relation with European colonial power. And, in turn, European colonial power could only dominate the region through Orientalism functioning as a technique and instrument of power. Here then Said’s third definition of Orientalism, drawing from the two previous epistemological definitions, demonstrates the intrinsically dialectical relation between knowledge and power. Said posits Orientalism is also: (3) The corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient Collectively Said conceptualises Orientalism as epistemological (both as a corpus of scholarly writings and a historical system of thought) and ontological (as in the nature of being, the structure and condition of power). Read critically, for Said the synthesis of Western power and knowledge had a singular ontological and teleological purpose; namely, the thingification or subjectivation of the colonized Oriental subject. This point is best demonstrated by William D. Hart’s analysis of Orientalism: In his description of discourse, Said appropriates Foucault’s ideas of discipline and power/knowledge. By discipline, Foucault [and by default Said] means those methods of modern punitive power that establishes meticulous control over the body, assuring its constant subjection by imposing a relation of “docility-utility”. Discipline, that is, makes human bodies docile and useful [thingifies], and advertises their availability for political, economic, and cultural uses of many kinds (2000, 70). And what of the latter Said’s “voyage in” and the powerful transformative attempt by the native to “write back” in the metropolis? Can this “contrapuntal reading” (Said 1994a, 288, 79), allow a discursive space where the native-intellectual, halfinvolved and half-detached (Said 1996), rejects the “hail” and the Althusserian “quadruple system” of interpellation (Althusser 1969)? Does the deliberate attempt in Said’s words to “enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten history” (Said 1994, 260) effect this equation? This latter Said, moving away from Foucauldian discursive formation and utilizing Gramsci’s hegemony or direzione culturale [cultural direction], envisions social space alike a Bourdieuean field. Revalorizing culture, political space becomes an arena where subjects engage in competent action and deploy different modes of capital and strategies in order to advance their position within the framework of a shared system of meaning (Bourdieu 1977). In this sense, Said announces in Culture and Imperialism (1994a) that “… no matter how apparently complete the dominance of an ideology or social system, there are always going to be parts of the social experience that it does not cover and control. From these parts very frequently comes opposition both self-conscious and dialectical” (Said 1994, 289). Accordingly, Said posits that the “new receptivity to both liberation movements and post-colonial criticism” not only challenges the “monopoly of discourse by Eurocentric intellectuals and politicians” (Said 1994, 316), but also creates a new form of subjectivity residing at a “median state” whereby power’s Manichean dichotomies are obscured.

In an effort to generate critical self- reflexivity on practices of Orientalism and Occidentalism there has been a proliferation of discourses on ‘strategic Orientalism’, ‘techno Orientalism’ and ‘military Orientalism’ as discussed below. Keith Krause and Andrew Latham (1998) argue that practices of ‘strategic orientalism’ constitute the ‘foundation of Western security culture’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, p. 41). They assert that strategic orientalism is premised on the ‘pervasive and axiomatic belief that the West (or occasionally the United States) as a civilization has a special role to play in global security affairs’’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, pp. 41, 37). This is based on ‘a reading of the politico-strategic objectives and purposes of Third World states that is informed more by Western fears and prejudices than by the realities of politics in these states’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, p. 38). The deep-rooted fear of the attacking Asian hordes and their ability to industrialize and develop sophisticated weapons reinforces twenty-first century concerns about the ‘Rising East’. This ‘phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo-or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse’ is understood as ‘techno-Orientalism’ (Roh et al., 2015, p. 2). Practices of techno-Orientalism driven by ‘imperial aspirations’ and ‘appetites of consumerist societies’ are ‘infused with the languages and codes of the technological and futuristic’ and in ‘digital spaces abound with reinscribed racial tropes and stereotypes; these are sites in which racialization is more likely reinforced than challenged’ (Roh et al., 2015, p. 14). Scholars developing the concept of techno-Orientalism observe its ‘growing prevalence in the Western cultural consciousness’ and suggest that the ‘US techno Orientalist imagination has its roots in the view of Asian body…as a form of expendable technology’ (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 7–11). Nevertheless they insist that the scope of techno-Orientalism is ‘expansive and bi-directional’ and ponder on the ‘danger that Asian and Asian American creators…might internalize techno Orientalist patterns and uncritically replicate the same dehumanizing model’ (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 3, 7). In investigating the intimacy of a relationship it might be possible to glean and ‘retrieve recessive images and practices’ that have been historically constituted through a network of social relations and processes (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 191). These might present creative opportunities to move beyond ‘policing boundaries of self as an exclusive and homogenous space’ and instead ‘appreciate and claim the self that exists as part of the other beyond those boundaries’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 204). Porter insists on ‘the interactive and power-political nature of war, which has a culture of its own that can change all parties to a conflict’ (2013, p. 55). Porter claims that, ‘paradoxically, war can drive cultures closer together’ (2013, p. 33). This is because, ‘war…is not simply a clash of Others, made possible by an ignorant horror of difference. The warrior looks out at the enemy and sees men who are, in crucial respects, recognizably like himself’ (Porter, 2013, p. 34). He also argues that an engagement with, ‘the foreign “Other” can be treated as a superior model to inform self-examination’ (2013, p. 108). But this hopeful promise of Military Orientalism has not stemmed the tide of populist discourses deploying the dynamic of difference between ‘The West and the Rest’ in the aftermath of the Cold War to wage and perpetuate a global War on Terror. On the contrary it is possible to argue that there is deliberate and contingent deployment of a ‘decivilizing rhetoric that blends irrational, aggressive, rigid, paranoid and exceptionalist discourses to demonize Other-ness’ and give ‘unwarranted authority and autonomy’ to ‘militarist and imperialist discourses of national security’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 670). There is ‘sustained use of decivilizing imagery’ that ‘represents the United States as a virtuous nation reluctantly but legitimately fulfilling its divine mandate to use civilized reason and superior force’ vis-a vis ‘nuclear capable and aspiring nations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East’ depicted in a ‘racist, sexist language that reproduces colonial ideology. As such it rejects the authority and legitimacy of these nations as potential possessors of nuclear weapons and solidifies continued dominance by the United States of the nuclear strategic environment’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 685). The strength of these populist discourses reinforcing a dynamic of difference and denial is exhibited with the contemporary ‘malpractice’ of the Trump administration to not respect the nuclear deal negotiated with Iran (Kimball, 2018). Nuclear weapons have long been regarded as ‘a new technological deity’ and ‘a divinely offered gift that endorsed American exceptionalism and imbued its creators with God-like power and the mission to restore order and justice in a fallen world.’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 677). Gabrielle Hecht (2012) defines nuclear exceptionalism as ‘insistence on an essential nuclear difference – manifested in political claims, technological systems, cultural forms, institutional infrastructures, and scientific knowledge’ and insists ‘nuclear exceptionalism could be made, unmade, and remade’ as ‘for all efforts at making nuclear things exceptional, there were opposing attempts to render them banal’ (Hecht, pp. 6– 8). It is important to bear this in mind as this pernicious dynamic of difference and exceptionalism becomes even more acute with current US President Donald Trump’s everyday populist declarations. He is on record for stating that the US will be at the ‘top of the pack’ ‘until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes’ (Holland, 2017). In his recent visit to Poland ‘to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization’ Trump (2017) claims ‘there are dire threats to our security and our way of life’ and argues, ‘the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.’ There is little doubt in his mind of the ‘triumph’ of the West (Holland, 2017). It is therefore helpful to pause in this tumultuous ‘history of the present’ and suggest that ‘every identity owes a debt to alterity’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 8). Thus it is interesting to observe how the existing literature on ‘dynamic of difference’ between Orientalism and Occidentalism has expanded its arsenal with a more complex conceptual apparatus of Strategic Orientalism, Techno Orientalism and Military Orientalism to helps us grasp the everyday practices of techno-racial dynamic of differences that cultivate and nurture techno-racial stereotypes. These stereotypes more often than not dictate modes of behavior that make the Other ‘a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed…an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only’ (Schmitt, 2007). It is this ‘dynamic of difference’ with its persistent desire to annihilate the Other, makes one wonder, whether it is not a complementary sub-text for an increasingly alarming and growing superstructure of a ‘dynamic of denial’ in weapons control? A dynamic of denial so petulant that it casts its shadow in celebrating the recent success of a Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty (2017).

Ahmad Sa'di (Arabic: احمد سعدي‎; Hebrew: אחמד סעדי; born 1958) is a Palestinian social scientist and a tenured professor in the Department of Politics and Government in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beer Sheva, Israel.[1] He is the author of multiple books. Most notably he co-authored Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (2007) with Lila Abu-Lughod. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_H._Sa%27di

In his afterword to the edition of Orientalism published in 1995, Said36 wrote: Not that Huntington, and behind him all the theorists and apologists of an exultant Western tradition, like Francis Fukuyama, haven’t retained a good deal of their hold on the public consciousness. They have, as is evident in the symptomatic case of Paul Johnson, once a Left intellectual, now a retrograde social and political polemicist. In the 18 April 1993 issue of the New York Times Magazine, by no means a marginal publication, he published an essay entitled ‘Colonialism's Back – And Not a Moment Too Soon’, whose main idea was that ‘the civilized nations’ ought to take it upon themselves to recolonize the Third World countries ‘where the most basic conditions of civilized life [have] broken down’, and to do this by means of a system of imposed trusteeships. Johnson is part of a large chorus of orientalists who had been invigorated by the intensification of Western intervention in the Middle East following the end of the Cold War and the identification of ‘Islam’ by Western powers as the new enemy. This group includes orientalists of various sorts such as Ibn Warraq,37 Irwin38 and Kaplan,39 among many others. As some critics of these new orientalists have unfailingly shown (eg Sadowski;40 Tuastad;41 Samiei42; Hamdi43) they have not added much to orientalism’s governing assumptions. Rather, they repeat conventional orientalist propositions regarding the uniqueness of Western civilisation and Orientals’ ontological incompetence. For example, Ibn Warraq argues that the Occident is uniquely characterised by three traits: ‘rationalism, universalism and self-criticism’.44 Furthermore, he and several other orientalists – such as Irwin – have claimed that orientalism has been driven by intellectual curiosity and is devoid of instrumental goals, as if the orientalist wrote in a socio-political and cultural vacuum. Such claims paradoxically support Said’s thesis regarding orientalism’s epistemology of setting up false binaries and decontextualising facts. It is beyond the scope of this article to dwell on the conservative nature of the orientalist discourse. It is sufficient to point to its citational methodology, and essentialising and decontextualising practices, which tend to block rather than encourage the introduction of new ideas and interpretations. However, given that neither the intent of dominance nor the Machiavellian methods of colonialism (called by political science scholars ‘realism’) have changed, a new and more sophisticated orientalist knowledge has been growing alongside and often overshadowing the above-mentioned old-style shrill and argumentative one. This neo-orientalist discourse has embodied various conceptual changes, which would make it appear more benign and ‘respectable’ so that it could be safely used by all sorts of groups, including liberals, in the public sphere. The most noticeable change is the disappearance of the construct of race and its substitution by the inoffensive and supposedly neutral terms of ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’. Moreover, the hierarchal ordering of groups has given way to a supposedly egalitarian classification based on difference. Yet these concepts are decoded – to use Hall’s conceptualisation45 – according to a time-honoured legacy of orientalism. Consequently, extreme right-wing parties and movements in Europe and the United States who advance orientalist and racist agendas quite often argue that they are not against non-White immigrants per se; rather, they claim that people feel more comfortable among those who share their religion and culture and are threatened by strangers. Therefore, social distance, exclusionary practices and a ban on immigration along ethnic or cultural lines are acceptable, particularly against unassimilated minorities. They contend that such policies are justifiable on the grounds that they help maintain social cohesion and the essence of national identity. Yet sociologists realised long ago the racialisation of cultural identities, a phenomenon they call the ‘new racism’, whereby culture instead of biology becomes the criterion for social ordering.46 A similar strategy of otherness construction was advocated by Huntington, one of the most influential and articulate right-wing intellectuals, who was paradoxically a supporter of American interventionist foreign policy. He called for a restriction on the migration of those who did not adhere to the American creed, which he described as [T]he product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill’.47 Although Huntington’s main concern was the fight against the migration of Mexicans, the tenets of his thesis are generalisable. More important is his allusion to the confluence of race and religion, variables through which large sections of ordinary Americans and some right-wing elites tend to construct the American (and the world) demographic landscape. Thus, Islam has been racialised, and like all racial categories, it has become a blanket label which is attached to a wide variety of peoples according to certain observable features. In this regard, Erik Love48 writes: Remember, because of race, nearly all references to ‘Muslims’ in discussions like these [on terrorism and counter terrorism] actually point to a racial category – the racial category that includes Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs and South Asians. Bigoted statements like ‘Most terrorists are Muslims’, or ‘Islamic culture encourages terrorism’ (as though there is only a single ‘Islamic culture’) are therefore necessarily racial statements that reinforce the perception that anyone who ‘looks Muslim’ may be dangerous. When public officials … propose policies to increase surveillance of ‘Muslims’, they not only place Muslim Americans in harm’s way, they also endanger Arabs, Sikh, and South Asian Americans as well because of race. Obviously, such a categorisation is a poor guide to making sense of social reality. For example, in a solo vengeance mission for the 9/11 attacks, a White American man shot and killed a Sikh. Later he stated that he wanted to shoot ‘… some towel-heads’.49 Several non-Muslims were victims of such racially motivated hate crimes. Even worse, Muslims have become the ultimate other for populist and right-wing movements in the United States and Europe. According to these movements, not only do Muslims not adhere to our ‘cherished values’, but they are essentially different. A considerable pseudo-scholarly literature has been published on such topics as the incompatibility of Islam with democracy and the violent nature of Islam. Despite the semantic and representational changes, both classical orientalism and neo-orientalism still employ binaries and oppositions in establishing their ‘facts’ and weaving their narratives. Yet the existence of various groups that do not fit their categorisations, such as hybrid populations and certain cultures – for example, the Japanese – defy their assertions. Moreover, the black populations who achieved citizenship in Western countries and have turned many Western societies into multi-cultural ones contest sweeping generalisations regarding a unified Western culture or ethnically based national identities. Therefore, the fight against the migration of people of colour has become a burning political and scholarly topic in the West. Immigrants are frequently portrayed by new-right and populist movements, and often by respectable media outlets and politicians, in the form of a new Dracula. They are accused of draining the country’s resources by their over-dependence on welfare and putting extra pressure on public services.50 They are also suspected of having double loyalties and hidden agendas. In Europe, immigrants are frequently accused of aiming to Islamise the continent. The emergence of the surveillance state since the early twenty-first century and along with it the securitisation of both the public discourse and public spaces amplifies the mistrust of immigrant (Muslim) populations in the West. The intense milieu of suspicion and fear that has consequently evolved, and the new technologies of surveillance that have been introduced, help to justify racial profiling, stigmatisation and the victimisation of innocent people of colour by putting them under surveillance.51 The relationships between neo-orientalist discourses and the technologies of security, war and surveillance are more complex and macabre and fall outside the scope of this paper. However, a telling example will be given later.

Bronwen joined Newcastle Law School as a lecturer in September 2014. She is Module Leader for Land Law (UG stage 1) and International Intellectual Property Law (LLM), and teaches patent law on Patents and Trademark law (UG Stage 3). She is module leader for Key Concepts in Corporate and Commercial Law, and teaches Comparative Law on the Fundamentals of Legal Translation, interdisciplinary courses taught in the School of Modern Languages.

Dating from the industrial revolution, IP law has been developing incrementally to the mutual benefit of, mostly European, countries as they developed. 9 1 The protection awarded has gradually increased in terms of the duration and strength of rights granted to IP owners. It is interesting to note, however, that the United States, for example, took a long time to reward foreign creations with IP protection. As an ex-colony of Great Britain, commercial policy in the US was punitive towards the ex-coloniser.92 Indeed, while early IP law in the US discriminates between US citizens and foreigners in general in terms of the cost of applying for a patent, it reserves the highest fee for British applicants. Before any application for a patent shall be considered by the commissioner as aforesaid, the applicant shall pay into the Treasury of the United States, or into the Patent Office, or into any of the deposite banks to the credit of the Treasury, if he be a citizen of the United States, or an alien, and shall have been resident in the United States for one year next preceding, and shall have made oath of his intention to become a citizen thereof, the sum of thirty dollars; if a subject of the King of Great Britain, the sum of five hundred dollars; and all other persons the sum of three hundred dollars.93 Furthermore, during its development phase, the US freely copied the creative works and inventions of non-Americans in a deliberate policy aimed at fast-tracking its own growth. The copying of literary works in the US reached a, 'sensational scale' in the midnineteenth century 94 prompting Charles Dickens to 'plead"' for the US to pass a copyright law protecting international copyright owners.96 At that time, copyright was limited to, 'a citizen or citizens of these United States or resident therein'.97 What's more, the law stated that, 'nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book, or books, written, printed, or published by any person not a citizen of the United States'.' The ability to legally copy the inventions and creative works of European creators has thus contributed to the growth and development of the United States. This did not prevent Americans from criticising Japan for doing exactly the same thing. Japan is now considered to be a developed country99, but Richard Vaughan complains that Japan's, 'meteoric rise was not based on Japanese innovation, but on the copying of Western ideas'.' In response to the defence that Japan was only doing the same as the US did in its development phase Vaughan says that times are different now and points to the greater significance of intellectual property. This seems to be a very weak argument and Vaughan's criticism of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand for also basing their, 'technological and economic advances' on 'their piracy of Western technology" 1 can just as easily be seen as an argument in favour of copying as a means of achieving development, as condemnation of the practice. As Susan Sell has noted, 'the way that issues are framed can make a great deal of difference in terms of what is and is not considered legitimate'.102