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Orientalism of Suffering: Trauma and the Production of Alterity

Yasmin Ibrahim (Queen Mary University of London, UK)

Technologies of Trauma

ISBN: 978-1-80262-136-5, eISBN: 978-1-80262-135-8

Publication date: 11 August 2022

Abstract

The domain of study on mediated suffering is ensconced within an Orientalist paradigm which ideologically structures our visuality and gaze. The consignment of suffering through bodies of alterity and the geo-politics of the Global South encodes the coloniality of power as a dominant reading. It then naturalizes the West as the voyeur in its consumption of the abject bodies of the Global South. Creating a binary through this East-West polarization in the oeuvre of suffering as a realm of study, it creates the hegemony of the West as the moral guardian of suffering, imbuing it with the right to accord pity and compassion to the lesser Other. Beyond elongating the Orientalist trajectory which lodged the body politic of the Global South as a sustained ideological site of suffering, it hermeneutically seals the East as irredeemable, ordaining it through the gaze over the Other as a mode of coloniality. In countering this Eurocentric proposition, this chapter contends that this coloniality of gaze needs further rumination and new sensibilities in the study of mediated suffering, particularly following 9/11 and the shifting of the geo-politics of suffering in which the West is dispossessed through its own manufactured ideologies of the ‘War on Terror’ such that it is under constant threat of terrorist attacks and through the movement of the displaced Other into the Global North. Besieged and entrapped through its own pathologies of risks and threats, the West is projected through its own victimhood and the politics of the Anthropocene within which risks are seemingly democratized by environmental degradation as an overarching threat for all of humanity. Despite these shifts in the global politics, the scholarship of suffering is locked into this polarity. The chapter interrogates this innate crisis within this field of scholarship.

Citation

Ibrahim, Y. (2022), "Orientalism of Suffering: Trauma and the Production of Alterity", Technologies of Trauma, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 65-91. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-135-820221004

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022 Yasmin Ibrahim. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited