NOTE: Nadia Michoustina will not be able to attend the conference.
In Bali, Nigel Barley writes in a recent article from British Airways inflight magazine Highlife, busloads of locals come down from remote villages to the beach to see and take photographs of the sleeping and naked Westerners. The Balinese say, "Wah! The West must be a great place. People who live there do not work, lie around all day, drink, have sex and fight. We would like to go there for a holiday" (Highlife, 26).
This example opens up a field for an important theoretical analysis of the construction of the spectacle of the "foreign" / and the "exotic" in anglophone travel narratives. Relying on Sartre's critique of the gaze, Lacanian concept of the gaze and Said's notion of Orientalism, I attempt to analyze the interrelationship between desire, vision and power in the West's constitution of itself as a corporeal spectacle in relation to the "Other," as an eroticized and exoticised object of the "Other's" gaze.
Briefly, in his critique of the gaze Sartre anticipates the analysis of the gaze in sustaining imperialist and racist domination detailed by Edward Said in Orientalism. In Said's sense Orientalism describes a strand of colonialist discourse in the ideological arsenal of Western nations-- notably Great Britain, France and the United States-- for representing the colonies and cultures of North Africa and the "Middle East." Said links essentializing vision with the Western appropriation of the "other, " and he argues that the regime of knowledge about the East is structured around a basic dichotomy between East and West, and Other and Self; and it is supported, justified and reinforced by the West's colonialist and imperialist ventures.
Recent work in cultural studies and post-colonial theory has been less totalizing, attempting to palliate the dichotomy of Said's account. It has been acknowledged, among other things, that Orientalist narratives sustain a measure of ideological incoherence and contradiction, and that a structured opposition between East and West does not exhaust power relations. Yet, there has been little attempt to account for an oscillation between the modes of West's relating to the Other, to explain a contest of gazes at work, and to distinguish among them.
Critical discussions of Bowles' Sheltering Sky and E.M. Forster's Passage to India often draw on Said's critique of the regime of the gaze and point to the novels' entanglement in the spectatorial epistemology and the narrative traditions of Orientalism. Contrary to these arguments, I propose that a complex interaction of looks at work in these remarkable novels complicates the problem of the West's relation to the Other and challenges Said's paradigm. For instance, Adele and Kate, while traveling in India and North Africa respectively, find themselves in a position where their internalization of the Other's exoticism, precludes their possibility of initiating and returning the gaze. Their spectatorial positions in relation to the other are denied. They see of course, but they are much more seen, captured by the gaze of the other. The dialectic of gazes also plays out with reference to their sexual/racial self consciousness. Their subjectivities are evoked under the gaze of the Other, and to a large extent they take on these objectifications as their own identities.
As the opening example suggests, the West's construction of itself as a spectacle in relation to the Other is also pronounced in contemporary travel writing. In this paper I explore the complex interaction of looks in Sheltering Sky and Passage to India in relation to power, desire and empire building and I also attempt to analyze a cultural politics at work in the contemporary symbolic reversal of the visuality of the white body in relation to the racial other. It seems that in West's displacement of the scopic drive, in its mimesis and internalization of otherness there is a disillusionment with the project of the empire.
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