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Why Orientalism Still Matters: Reading ‘Casual Forgetting’ And ‘Active Remembering’ As Neoliberal Forms Of Contestation In International Politics, Shiera S. Malik
Why Orientalism Still Matters: Reading ‘Casual Forgetting’ And ‘Active Remembering’ As Neoliberal Forms Of Contestation In International Politics, Shiera S. Malik
Shiera S el-Malik
In 2007, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (BJPIR) devoted an issue to gendering International Relations. It opens with Cynthia Enloe addressing the ‘politics of casual forgetting’. I investigate this notion of casual forgetting using a framework informed by postcolonial and feminist scholarship. Working with ideas drawn from critiques of Orientalism and neoliberalism, I examine knowledge practices that center binaries as forms of objectivity that disembed phenomena from context, and as forms of over-simplification that flatten the appearance of complexity. Together, these practices have a depoliticizing effect; they obscure contestation, situate hierarchy as natural, and separate analysis …