This panel is the second in what I envision as a series of sessions with the title “The Orient Writes Back.” The series revisits the premises Edward W. Said puts forward in his Orientalism, by shifting the focus from European narratives to those produced in geographies confined to the imaginary of "the Orient." De-centering Western literary representations, these sessions examine what it means to be self-consciously “oriental” through the lenses of “orientalized” literatures and writers. The main objective of the series, therefore, is to acknowledge and analyze the agency of the “oriental subject” as imagined by non-Western authors.

That Orientalism accommodates more than “cultural domination,” and that it can even foster self-critical engagements has been duly noted by scholars. Ros Ballaster’s Fabulous Orients (2005), Srinivas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism(2011), Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud’s Radical Orientalism (2015), among others, challenged and extended Saidian conceptualization of Orientalism by revealing the potential of the orient and orientals to contest the self-representation of European subjects. While contributing to these efforts to bring to light the unorthodox aesthetic and political economies of Orientalism, this series of sessions differs from them by foregrounding the negotiations with and resistances to power structures that do not center on, or may not even reference the West as the ultimate concern, thus revising the interpretations of "the oriental" by drawing attention to its self-representations.

In the first session of the series (2021), panelists examined Iranian, Ottoman Turkish, and Sudanese responses and engagements with Orientalism. The papers included here in the second session address unconventional iterations of Orientalism found in the works of Chinese, Japanese, Latvian, and Russian authors. They share the critical urge to revise Said's conceptualization of "the oriental" in ways that are sharply attuned to the political and aesthetic agency of non-Western subjects. Each paper is allowed 12-13 minutes to ensure that the panel has at least 20 minutes left for further discussion and questions.

Menglu Gao will deliver the first presentation, putting two Chinese novellas written for the English missionary John Fryer’s 1895 fiction contest— Xiling Sanren’s Delightful History of a Glorious Age and Zhan Xi’s Love among the Flowers—in dialogue with British medical missionaries’ writings and translations on addiction treatment. Gao’s paper focuses on how Britain’s Orientalist discourses—which cast opium addiction as a Chinese disease—were “translated” into China’s own anti-colonial writings. Gao demonstrates that this transformation from “oriental” to “decolonial” became possible in an ironically painful way, namely, Chinese writers themselves absorbed the drug’s enervating effects into China’s reflection on its new relationship with Britain in the new world system, using addiction treatment as a metaphor for reform.

The second paper, to be presented by Mieko Anders, studies Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1986 novel An Artist of a Floating World by turning to original archival research on the novel’s draft materials in order to show that the novel was never meant to be set in Japan in the first place. Anders argues that these archival materials prompt us to reconsider the novel on its own terms; in choosing to set the novel in Japan and explore the interiority of a Japanese imperialist, Ishiguro disrupts the “Manichaeism” of conventional postcolonial frameworks that conceptualize imperialism and colonialism as neatly falling along East/West divisions.

In the third presentation of the session, Evan Alterman investigates late imperial Russian and early Soviet travelogues about the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic, analyzing the generation and maintenance of expansionist, imperialist-tinged discourse in constructions of time and space in Ivan Bunin’s “Bird’s Shadow” (1908), Pëtr Pavlenko’s Istanbul and Turkey (1930), and Lev Nikulin's Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir (1935). In this paper Alterman casts lights on what happens when marginal spaces – those negligibly (or, arguably, non-) European – are both the subject and object of marginal texts and of an “extrospective” orientalism that spans across a contiguous border.

Karlis Verdins presents the fourth and final paper of the panel which examines the limits and promises of oriental agency through the works of Latvian modernist poet and art critic Andrejs Kurcijs. Looking at Kurcijs’s A Barbarian in Paris(Barbars Parīzē, 1925), Verdins shows that the poet creates a character of a self-proclaimed Barbarian who would go to Paris to find his soulmates. However, Verdins contends, this imagined micro-clash of civilizations ends with the Barbarian growing anxious and finally distancing himself from the “old broad” Paris; leaving him with a sense of terror and existential unfulfillment.