Not that this is to be seen as a confrontational volume. Rather, it just quietly goes its own way. Some of what must unfortunately, for the time being at least, be called the "mainstream" writers and their books do appear here, notably Edward Said's Orientalism, which a majority of these authors cite somewhere or other, though frequently to dissent from its conclusions. But Said is the best of a bad lot, as the British say -- ?cogent and manifestly sincere, and keeping jargon to an absolute minimum (the possibility of its being dispensed with altogether is never countenanced).
Teeuwen's independence of mind is never in question. His introduction, for example, openly champions the Enlightenment -- ?the 18th century movement that sought to educate ordinary people in the principles of reason, truth and justice -- ?when it has been ferociously attacked by the politically correct (their term for themselves) as being Euro-centric and racially exclusive. In fact it spawned innumerable reforms including the abolition of the slave trade and laws (in some countries) against excessive, or at least public, cruelty to animals, albeit advances that scientific vivisection has effectively, and all but silently, reversed.
But "Essentialist!" scream the know-nothing students, meaning their victim dares to suggest some values might be good in all places and at all times. Such puritan pieties clearly cut no ice with Teeuwen, however. "For such as me," he writes, "postcolonialism often feels like a voluntary-compulsive trip to an Orwellian Room 101 where we go to squirm, to be confronted with out guilt, and to confess -- ?but we hardly ever come to love Big Brother".
There are many other interesting things in this varied and stimulating book. Two contributors look at the work of the Chinese commentator on Western countries Chiang Yee, author of several "Silent Traveler" books on his visits to different parts of the US and UK in the 1930s and later. Another asks why so many early British travelers in North America claimed that nature was somehow lacking there -- ?the elephant, tiger, lion, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, camel and buffalo were none of them found -- ?and went on to claim that democracy itself, which in those days the US was pioneering, was somehow therefore flawed.
This, then, is an altogether excellent book, and Bookman in Taipei are to be congratulated on publishing it. There is also a companion volume containing selected papers in Chinese from what was in fact a bilingual conference.
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