Gao Xingjian’s 2000 Nobel Prize win is a commonly cited example of the global literary market’s “technologies of recognition,” where the West acts as an “agent of recognition,” which recognizes the other according to its own standards, while the non-West is an “object of recognition,” that desires to be recognized. Rather than presuming the passivity of Gao’s reproduction of Western cultural dominance, I am more interested in exploring how he actively reconstructs Chinese culture with Orientalist elements. For example, Of Mountains and Seas (1989) and Snow in August (1997) are two plays which Gao completed in France and which appropriates ancient Chinese cultures. With reference to Gao’s “cold” theatrical techniques of suppositionality and tripartite acting I argue that these two plays address feminist and religious limitations in ancient Chinese cultures by strategically appropriating Orientalist stereotypes in their portrayals of the Chinese mythology of Chang E escaping to the moon and Zen Buddhism respectively. Overall, this paper contributes a more nuanced understanding of Gao’s negotiations with Orientalism: Gao’s “escape” from Orientalism is less about the avoidance of Orientalism than a theatrical staging of Orientalism.
The paper deals with material mining of chapters of Robert G. Gleig’s travelogue where the author describes his journey through the Northeast Bohemia borderland in 1837. On the basis of linguistic means that Gleig uses in his description, it constructs the concept of periferism, stemming from E. Said’s orientalism. It defines periferism as a set of concepts and assumptions describing the periphery and leading to a special treatment of the periphery, i.e. a marginal part of its own social-cultural system that is socially and culturally inferior to the core - the center. The concept of periferism proposes to contemplate over the relationship of social elites and bourgeois circles with the inhabitants of the Czech countryside in the XIX century in the framework of their varied interests in this (social) space (tourism, so-called ethnographic interest, educational activities, etc.).