Why Orientalism still matters: Reading ‘casual forgetting’ and ‘active remembering’ as neoliberal forms of contestation in international politics

Abstract

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 centre 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 depoliticising effect; they obscure contestation, situate hierarchy as natural, and separate analysis from its embeddedness in historical and political conditions, even in work guided by critical agendas. I trace these depoliticising practices in a conversation in the 2007 Special Issue of BJPIR and show that Enloe's comments present a push for critical analysis that was overlooked by the Special Issue's editors in their attempt to more clearly delineate the subdiscipline of Gender and International Relations (IR) as distinct from feminist IR. This article suggests that Enloe's plea is effectively one for ‘active remembering’ as a way to render visible the insidious forms of power that give a stable appearance to categories of social phenomena.

Critical privilege studies: Making visible the reproduction of racism in the everyday and international relations

“…But the problem is larger. Despite abundant evidence of institutionalized racism, international relations persists not only in habitual neglect and a deeply flawed theorization of race, but also in actively resisting, marginalizing, depoliticizing, and hence devalorizing anti-racist research and those who produce it (Bhambra et al, 2020; Chowdhry and Rai, 2009; El-Malik, 2015; Shilliam, 2020; Vitalis, 2015). Given epistemological priorities, we might expect this resistance by conventionally ahistorical, non-reflexive mainstream scholars.…”