Dis-orientation: Master-narratives and counter-readings of Medieval writings about alterity

My work seeks to understand the ways in which the Medieval world fantasizes, imagines, and negotiates the concept of Alterity, especially in relation to the Orient and the formation of communal and Self identities. This project raises issues about narrative and social consequences of imagining racial and/or Oriental Otherness during pre-modern Europe, confronting these texts within post-colonial paradigms that attempt to deconstruct racial and sexual power relationships. In addition to exploring the narrative deployments of the racial and sexual Other in texts, I also propose ways to challenge and intervene in the seemingly rigid binary constructs of East/West, Masculine/Feminine, and Self/Alterity by offering subversive readings that emphasize the performative nature of these texts.; Addressing my primary concerns about the construction of the Orient and other forms of cultural Alterity, my first four chapters chart the identity formations of Selfhood and Otherness that appear to be defined by racial and sexual differentiation. Such differentiation, I argue, leads to a language of domination and violence. The last chapter takes this concern to the present cultural debates about ethnology and literary production. Ultimately, my work demonstrates that identity formation in terms of racial, sexual and colonial power relationships is unstable and inconsistent. The construction of cultural Alterity ties so intimately and pleasurably to the Self/communal formation that the boundaries and borders between Self and Other, Man and Woman, and East and West are constantly dis-oriented and altered. In fact, the signs of "differences" about the Other are uncannily familiar to the "sameness" of the Self.