Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 71

Positionality, Film, and
Asian American Literature
In Orientalism, Palestinian American scholar Edward Said divides
Orientalism into two categories: the latent Orientalism which is represented by
“an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity” and the mani
fest Orientalism which includes “the various stated views about Oriental society,
languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth” (206). Whereas the latent
Orientalism is unanimous, stable and durable, the manifest Orientalism is chiefly
responsible for ac centuating the differences between the East and West; it can be
seen in the portrayal of “the separateness of the orient, its eccentricity, its back
wardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability”
(206). Said’s interest in problematizing the definition and function of culture is as
engaging as his critical methodology which is not dissimilar to those employed by
other postcolonial scholars. In a 1983 interview with University of CalifomiaBerkeley Professor Paul Rabinow, et al., French scholar Michele Foucault responded
to the criticism that his study of modem power stmctures lacked an overall theory
and, therefore, was anarchistic in nature. Foucault argued that he believed that the
forms of totalization offered by politics are always, in fact, very limited. What he
attempted to achieve was, to the contrary, apart from any totalization—^which would
be at once abstract and limiting—to open up problems that are as concrete and
general as possible; he was interested in studying problems that approach politics
from behind and cut across societies on the diagonal, problems that are at once
constituents of our history and constituted by that history (“Politics and Ethics: An
Interview” 375-76). In “Subject and Power,” Foucault again states that the key
issue is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. For the political,
ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the indi
vidual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from
the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state (216).
Both Foucault and Said’s theoretical approach to the study of the archae
ology of knowledge are as dialectical as their belief in the importance of opening
up problems that are as concrete and general as possible is strong. Both build their
argument on a decentralizing that leaves no privilege to any center. Thus, to sug
gest that they develop a new theory to replace those which the scholars challenge
is to misunderstand the very basic premises of postcolonial criticism. Further, to
apply the critical methodology employed by postcolonial theorists to the analysis
of the latest (re)presentation of the Asian American experience in film by both
Asian American and non-Asian American writers, directors, and producers is to