Critiques of Orientalism rely on ontological accounts of difference that produce renewed Orientalism – turns the K

Orientalism is a term that Edward Said excavates and retools in books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. He labels Orientalist Western discourse that, by constructing and imagining the non-Western; world in prejudicial or violent modes, generates and affirms Western hegemony. Orientalism deals with the way a particular First World, Western subject, in its representations of peoples and sites of the Third World, establishes itself as the universal subject. The critique of Orientalism, which I shall call de-orientalism (not to be confused with Occidentalism or the reversal of Orientalism), tries to dismantle this Orientalist discourse. It veils the misconceptions and biases that Orientalisim itself both and conceals. De-orientalism also attempts to restore the wronged or violated discourses. For if Orientalism abjects other worlds, it only makes sense that the critique of Orientalisrn would attempt to recover that excluded domain, to recuperate a subjectivity of difference. One cannot be at all sure, however, that this critical response to Orientalism actually avoids participating in the very discourse that it contests, especially when one considers the project in terms of its overall teleology. Before pursuing this last point, a word on this study’s use of the term Other is necessary. Said’s critique of Orientalism does not intend to define the Third World Other. Rather Said demonstrates how vertain cultures and races have been Othered. Orientalism is not about the devaluation of the Other, as many seem to believe; it is about Othering as devaluation. Indeed non-Western sites are abjected the moment they are Othered. Said’s Third World Other is not an ontological but an existential category. It emerges when, in a particular historical, cultural, or political situation, a Western discourse objectifies the foreign or the unfamiliar. In this structure, any person, group, class, or site can potentially occupy the place of the Other or that of the Same. Therefore much Latin American scholarship that seems faithful to Said’s project actually betrays it (although it must be noted that Said too at times betrays his own undertaking). This scholarship assumes Latin America to be A priori Other, reveals how this Otherness has been violated, and then tries to recover that alterity. It presupposes an authentic Other who preexists an inauthentic Othering, whereas Said’s critique succeeds insofar as it does not make such presuppositions. This (perhaps inevitable) slippage in Latin American and postcolonial studies between the ontological and the cultural, the essential and the existential-between a reading that posits Third World inhabitants as Other (an ontological statement) and one that studies the way that, at a specific historical moment, particular discourses and peoples have fabricated this Otherness (a cultural statement)-is of course of enormous interest. However, critics striving to expose the radical aspects of Said’s work should not forget that the Saidian Other is not a given but a construct: a product of the West, racism, metaphysics, and global Capi-tal. Thus when I implement the word Other in this study, l am referring to those figures who have been named and posited as Other by Western discourses, not to peoples or sites supposed to be really (ontologically) Other. At the same time, my analysis is attentive to de-orientalism's (and Said's) tendency to slide from the cultural to the ontological, for this is precisely my point: Latin American de-orientalism repeats Orientalism rather than critiquing it, because it ontologizes alterity and cultural difference.