Discourses of the east and the west and their implications for intercultural relations

Journal of Multicultural Discourses
ISSN: 1744-7143 (Print) 1747-6615 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmmd20
Discourses of the east and the west and their
implications for intercultural relations
Jieyoung Kong
To cite this article: Jieyoung Kong (2016): Discourses of the east and the west and
their implications for intercultural relations, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, DOI:
10.1080/17447143.2016.1167897
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2016.1167897
Published online: 04 Apr 2016.
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Date: 15 April 2016, At: 19:08
JOURNAL OF MULTICULTURAL DISCOURSES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2016.1167897
REVIEW ARTICLE
Discourses of the east and the west and their implications for
intercultural relations
Jieyoung Kong
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Department of Communication, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, USA
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 17 January 2016
Accepted 9 February 2016
The gaze of the West and framings of the East, edited by Shanta Nair-Venugopal,
Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, xv + 264 pp., US$100.00 (hardcover), ISBN
978-0-230-30292-1
The discourse of occidental studies: a perspective from Malaysia, by Shanta Nair-Venugopal, Selangor, Malaysia, Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 2013, 59 pp., US$12.00
(paperback), ISBN 978-967-412-149-5
This review article examines two publications on a set of discourses about the East and by
the West in the context of cultural contact, flow, and change taking place today. The
author of the monograph and the contributors to the edited volume are scholars from
the humanities and the social sciences based largely in Malaysia. As an academic who is
more familiar with the social scientific approach to human communication and culture,
undertaking a review of two books from a different intellectual impulse and genre than
those I am more familiar with was like an intercultural journey, however. I had to traverse
into a less familiar intellectual territory, namely post-colonial and cultural studies, and plop
myself down in middle of a conversation with little knowledge of the disciplinary registers
and techniques, be it in philosophy, history, architecture, or Occidental Studies. I felt disoriented. Part of the disorientation I experienced owed to the fact that I did not have the
benefit of a hermeneutical understanding to navigate effectively through a terrain full of
land mine-like tropes – such as the East, the West, Orientalism, Occidentalism, Easternization, and Westernization. I did not, however, eschew the discomfort. I continued my
journey, because these authors were struggling with concerns similar to those that preoccupied me: ‘the way people see and confront each other in increasingly interconnected
world where differences are constantly being fudged through contact and acculturation
despite the effects of hegemony and orthodoxy’ (Nair-Venugopal, 2012, 23). Moreover, I
recognized the larger discursive gesture these writings are making: to foster intercultural
dialogue across regions of the world and traditions of thought on the one hand, and to
CONTACT Jieyoung Kong
[email protected]
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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J. KONG
democratize the dominance of the West and the peripheral marginality of the East, like
Malaysia, in the global intellectual discourse on the other. The basis of my review is, therefore, found on the idea of learning from unfamiliar encounters, rather than on shared epistemic commitments with the writers of these two books. In this review, I share my
commentary, critique, and appreciation of their narratives through my scholarly prism
in order to facilitate mutual learning and dialogue for broadening differing intellectual horizons at a global level.
The Gaze of the West and Framings of the East (2012), edited by Shanta Nair-Venugopal,
brings together writings of 12 scholars in Malaysia, Japan, United Kingdom, and France.
Each of the contributors in this edited collection explores the views and attitudes of the
Anglo-American West towards the East by examining how the West consumes and interprets the material and transcendental cultural influences from the East. The book is composed of 15 chapters, which have been organized into 4 parts. The first part (Chapter 1)
introduces the book project, making clear the challenge of doing critical theory in the
Malay context, where Muslim viewpoints are generally averse to post-modern deconstruction. In the second part (Chapters 2–4), each of the three authors provides a thorough
explanation about the project’s boundary, analytical approach, and object of analysis.
The third part (Chapters 5–14) is the largest section, which examines discourse produced
by the ‘West’ at specific sites of cultural encroachments and appropriation of non-Western
cultural legacies. The first four chapters deal with how the gaze perceives and represents
the religio-philosophical traditions and historical narratives of the East. The subsequent six
chapters delve further into material practices in concrete contexts, such as in training and
management, tourism, cultural life of work and business, architecture, gastronomy, and
health and alternative medicine. The fourth and last part (Chapter 15) brings the whole
intellectual enterprise to a tidy closure. The literary style of this edited book is dense,
especially for unaccustomed readers to cultural and post-colonial studies. But the contributing authors have written assiduously about the underlying assumptions and
approaches of their investigation so that those students and scholars new to the topic
can follow and benefit from the ensuing discussions in the third part of the book.
The Discourse of Occidental Studies: A Perspective from Malaysia (2013) is a treatise based
on a lecture that Shanta Nair-Venugopal delivered at the Institute of Occidental Studies
(IKON) at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). It outlines basic principles that
guide the academic enterprise of Occidental Studies in Malaysia. Occidental Studies is
the study of European cultures and civilizations both in Europe and of European settlers
around the world (the so-called West) in the context of the shifting global economic
and political landscape and the reconfiguration of its social and cultural horizons: ‘It examines western thought and philosophy, history and civilization, and the intersections of
international relations and political economy, intercultural relations and identity politics,
as well as those of contemporary art and culture, media and technologies’ (15). The distinction Nair-Venugopal makes between Occidental Studies and Occidentalism is interesting
and necessary as she tries to clarify a new direction for the study of the West whose neoliberal capitalist democracies are now confronted with unintended consequences of globalization, thereby making the tropes of East/West increasingly irrelevant.
The subject of both books is the Occident, that is, Europe, Europeans, and their diaspora
in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, and its civilizational and cultural
impact on global cultural flows and order. Their topic, however, is the West’s discursive
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3
construction of the Other and its Otherness, or how it views itself in relation to what it is
not, from the perspective of the non-Western Other. The emerging Occidentalism in these
works does not culminate into a counterpoint to Said’s (1978) seminal work on Orientalism.
They are not about how the West is viewed and imagined by the non-West. Occidentalism
has a long history in the East, some going back as far as the fifth century to dynastic histories of what we now come to understand as China (Bonnett, 2004). Rather these works
use the gaze from the East to tease out ideas, attitudes, and ramifications of the gaze of the
West which has arguably become more reflexive; that is, the West not only continues to
opine about the East, but its discourses about the East are now informed by the West’s
perception and recognition of its own praxis of Easternization and cultural change. In
other words, these writings are about how the non-West sees the ways the so-called
West thinks about the non-West through the specific practices rather than in the abstract.
Their conclusion is that the ‘gaze’ of the West is not monolithic but ‘multifaceted and
complex’ (Nair-Venugopal, 2012, 247). Despite the cultural power of the ‘gaze’ of the
West in framing the East, by trying to see the East through the gaze of the West, these
books attempt to push the discourse of Occidentalism and Orientalism to generate a discursive space for ‘a genuine intercultural and intercivilizational dialogue’ (Nair-Venugopal,
2013, 46).
Both of the books make valuable contributions for understanding key tropes necessary in
‘talking about’ the global cultural relations today, such as the East and the West, Orientalism
and Occidentalism, and Easternization and Westernization. As Connell (2007) pointed out,
they are quick shorthand ways of naming global divisions, like the ‘North/South’ divide used
in UN debates, ‘developed/underdeveloped’ in development and dependency theory, or
‘core/periphery’ from the world-systems theory. As these books argue, their cultural formations and dynamics are not static configurations, but constituted by appropriative
relations. This is part of an inescapable process of absorption and transformation when cultures come into contact – what Rogers (2006) described as ‘an “always already” condition of
contemporary culture’ (493). Entering the discursive horizon of others, who are embedded
in concrete local situations, is an effective way for understanding how the East meets the
West, and why people and places in the world continue to be made and remade not in
the image of the West or the East, but in accordance with their respective aspirations and
longings. It is in working out individual and collective struggles that people draw upon institutions of modernity, identity, cultural legacies, systems of thought, and techniques available in their horizon. The authors of these two books entered the discursive horizons of
the West ‘without a hierarchical sense of international and intercultural relations’ (Miike,
2014, 28) so as to produce knowledge that is locally and globally relevant while mitigating
rift, divisiveness, and even animosity. Understanding how the other thinks – as these books
do by trying to understand how its other (the West and its discourse) makes sense of such
appropriative relations – is the beginning of wisdom.
Yet, in terms of establishing intercultural and intercivilizational dialogue, which is no
other than bringing two (or more) sets of realities together, these books are only partially
successful. One major challenge to opening up a new perspective on global discourse of
difference has been overcoming the trappings of a predictive post-colonial bias that
‘haunt any work looking at the West through the lens of the Other, regardless of the original motivation’ (Nair-Venugopal, 2012, 38). Its epistemic commitment predisposes one’s
analysis to binarism, precluding any possibility that a gaze can relativize its own view
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J. KONG
and be culturally relative. It is this overly suspicious and dichotomizing rift that also frustrated Furumizo (2005) who examined the discourses of Occidentalism and Orientalism.
Using one’s understanding of one’s tradition, or kastom, to investigate the gaze of the
West and its valence is effective in drawing boundaries and provincializing the cultural
power of the gaze. However, the lack of contextualization of one’s own view leaves
readers like me, who is from the East (i.e. Korea) but do not share the same cultural background as the authors, helpless and unable to understand the implicit worldview and attitude they bring to their analysis. The most interesting part of these books is, ironically, the
gaze of the East used to deconstruct the ‘gaze’ of the West. Unlike the West, which is relatively coherent, the non-Western East occupies a vast uneven and textured space that
escapes facile reductionism. It encompasses the geographic expanse from the Middle
East all the way to Northeast Asia, straddling Islam and Christianity, Hinduism and
Jainism, Buddhism and Confucianism, and their indigenized syncretisms, with varying
experiences of colonialism, imperialism from within and without, and post-colonial
nation-state political consolidations. I would have liked to know how the authors themselves view particular cultural legacies from the East independent of the West’s discourse.
I would have liked to read a parallel analysis of the nature of the gaze of the East about its
own kastom alongside their analysis of the gaze of the West. In this sense, it was disappointing that the authors of these books primarily imagined their audience to be the
West and not the wider global audience.
In summary, these two books are now part of a growing body of literature within the
broader academic discourse that critiques the Eurocentric bias, assumption, and dominance across the humanities and social sciences (e.g. Connell, 2007; Kim, 2002; Shi-xu,
2014, 2015). The intellectual consciousness of the non-West is increasingly gathering
size, and any serious researcher must recognize and contend with the global context
we now inhabit. Such kind of intellectual endeavor would not have been possible in previous eras of cultural contact and engagement. It is an undeniable consequence of the
intensification and acceleration of globalization, where scholars outside of the West not
only consume cultural products, especially intellectual discourse, from the West, but
also partake in their discursive productions, however asymmetrical this may be due to
the fact that English is the undisputed lingua franca.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
References
Bonnett, A. 2004. The idea of the west: Culture, politics, and history. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Connell, R. 2007. Southern theories: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Cambridge, UK:
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Furumizo, E. 2005. East meets west and west meets east: A comparison of occidentalism and orientalism. Review of Communication 5, no. 2/3: 128–137.
Kim, M.-S. 2002. Non-western perspectives on human communication: Implications for theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Miike, Y. 2014, December. Between conflict and harmony in the human family: Asiacentricity and its
ethical imperative for intercultural communication. Paper presented as keynote address at the 4th
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