Paul Bowles as Orientalist: Toward a Nomad Discourse
Abstract
To use the rubric “orientalist” in reference to the 20th-century American composerwriter Paul Bowles is to suggest not one but potentially many things, some of them obvious and others much less so. The one thing that I do not mean by calling Bowles an orientalist is the one thing that Orientalism for the past twenty years has become a code for: racism and imperialist sentiment. In his landmark study Orientalism 1978 , Edward Said sets up the equation that still remains in place, at least to a certain degree, twenty years later: given that 19th-century Europeans tended to reduce the “Orient” to a set of essentializations,idées reçues, and stereotypes, he contends
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