Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (review)

Madeleine Dobie’s Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism joins the already substantial body of criticism that has been critiquing, debating, and striving to transcend Edward Said’s account of Orientalism. Dobie explains in political and intellectual terms her reasons for contributing one more volume to those efforts. Since Orientalism appeared in 1978, the trends Said gathered under that name have maintained their power and even extended their cultural reach. Western representations of the East continue to be shaped by racist stereotypes honed in the colonial period, and those images are partly responsible for mounting anti-Americanism in African and Middle Eastern countries such as Sudan and Iraq. Images of veiled Arab women are being deployed with increasing frequency to signify the perceived threat of Islam. In France, Foreign Bodies‘ main locus of concern, exoticism has retained its appeal, and the debates over the wearing of the veil/hijab that began in 1989 with the famous affaire du lycée de Creil continue amidst rising French anxieties over Muslim immigration and French identity. Dobie’s aim in intervening in these ongoing debates is to dismantle the oppositions structuring Orientalist representations, including those of métropole and colony, center and margins. Her political goal is to change the current predicament.