Translating Orients : between ideology and Utopia / Timothy Weiss.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Weiss examines texts that reference Asian, North African, or Middle Eastern societies and their imaginaries, and, equally important, engage questions of individual and communal identity that issue from transformative encounters.

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CHOICE Review

Weiss (Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong) is concerned both with the "Orient" in relation to "texts that reference Asian, North African, or Middle Eastern societies and their traditions" and with translating as "an act that orients--here, a verb--because the process is cognitive and heuristic." Using "orientalist" in a neutral rather than the condemnatory sense assumed by those critics who follow Edward Said's influential Orientalism (CH, Apr'79), Weiss focuses on a diverse group of exemplary writers: Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Bowles, David T.K. Wong, Kazua Ishiguro, Ricardo Piglia, and Salman Rushdie. Instead of offering a sustained critique of conventional postcolonial criticism, he tries to change the topic by recovering literature's "utopian dynamic," which he opposes to "ideological fundamentalism, or the non-dynamic and the frozen." At first somewhat eccentric, the book becomes inspiring toward the end, as the author draws on Buddhist thought and on such writers as Edouard Glissant, Amin Maalouf, Tzvetan Todorov, and V.S. Naipaul to conclude that "multiculturalism can serve as a viable social concept only if it is understood as cultural interrelatedness, not as a gamut of essentialist identities." ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. T. Ware Queen's University at Kingston