K - Orientalism - CNDI 2024

Orientalism K – CNDI 2024
1nc Orientalism K Shell:
The affirmative is the reification of an intellectual property rights regime that is the product of the colonial western legal order and American empire.
Jones, B. (2012). Orientalism, Postcolonialism and Intellectual Property Protection in Egypt. J. Comp. L., 7, 112.
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
Orientalism relies on an international European – Eastern binary that reifies global structures of interstate and demographic violence.
Sa’di, Ahmad H. "Orientalism in a globalised world: Said in the twenty-first century." Third World Quarterly 42, no. 11 (2021): 2505-2520.
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.
Orientalism fuels western exceptionalism’s cleansing of the periphery and occludes in nuclear war
Mathur 2k18 (Ritu, Dr Ritu Mathur is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), Techno-Racial dynamics of denial & difference in weapons control)
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

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