Two Thing Tuesday: Esoteric Orientalism and Reparative Reading

This weekend, I read Mandarin Dubey’s short book in the Cambridge Elements series titled Esoteric Orientalism (2024). Being a Cambridge Elements title, this book offered a minimal commitment to helping my contextualize Blavatsky a bit more clearly in the 19th century context and offered an opportunity for a more sympathetic reading of her work which often stands as a kind of origin point for critiques of pseudo-archaeology. 

Thing the First

Esoteric Orientalism offers what Dubey sees as a reparative reading of Blavatsky that sought to unpack her ideas of race, language, culture, and religion in the context of late 19th century Orientalist thought. Dubey sets Blavatsky in opposition to German Orientalist Max Müller and argues that Blavatsky’s rejection of racial and linguistic categories as the basis for understanding religion offered an alternative to the emerging work on scientific linguistics and religious studies pioneered by Müller. Even the casual reader of Blavatsky will understand that she rejects the methods and conclusions associated with scientific linguistic and studies of religion. In their place, she proposes both the need to acquire esoteric knowledge and a mythic cosmology of race, language, and religion that is universal and totalizing. A reparative reading of Blavatsky allows one to see in her work a narrative that subverts the emerging discourse of scientific linguistics (and religion) which becomes an unfortunate basis for scientific race theory of the 20th century. For Blavatsky, scientific notions of race (as well as caste) were as irrelevant to her esoteric Orientalism as the unenlightened theories sprung forth from German university campuses. 

Thing the Second

Dubey’s reading of Blavatsky pushed me to return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s brilliant 1997 paper “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” which she published as the introduction to her edited volume Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997). In this well-known essay, Sedgwick challenges the prevalence of paranoid reading. For Sedgwick paranoid reading privileges the revealing of institutional power both in the present and in the past (and its looming danger in the future). In its worst form, the result of this is that readers retroject the abuses and injustices of the present back onto texts of the past through genealogical analysis and this renders the present situation not only inevitable but also suggests that future injustice is essentially unavoidable. This allows the paranoid reader to remain unsurprised by the problems of the present that because they recognize that they have always already existed. Sedgwork is clear that such readings are often justified, accurate, and significant. Moreover, she is deeply sympathetic to many of the political positions of the authors whose work embraces paranoid reading. That said, she advocates for a form of reparative reading that goes beyond revealing the roots of institutional and structural injustice and instead emphasizes the power of texts to create new meanings, new positions, and by extension, new futures.  (This is a very ham-fisted reading of what is an incredibly rich and deeply sympathetic article).  

Dubey’s unorthodox reading of Blavatsky and her work to demonstrate how the esoteric texts of Theosophy offered (and offer?) a counter current to both 19th century scientific racism but also tacitly offered a position from which to critique various forms of contemporary social and cultural “exotericism” grounded in persistent Orientalism.

This resonated with me in part because it seems to me that 20th-century pseudoarchaeology offers any number of perspectives susceptible to genuinely reparative reading. An appeal to Sedgwick’s ideas allows me to recognize the value of paranoid readings (and the political and disciplinary positions that these reading occupy) while still offering a productive alternative to their perspectives. For pseudoarchaeology, this may be as simple a continuing to recognize the impact of pseudoarchaeological ideas on the production of disciplinary knowledge as a way to remind ourselves that such contributions are possible in the present and future.

Post Script

For various readings I read Dubey’s Esoteric Orientalism as a paper book. This was a miserable and slightly bizarre experience. First, the font was tiny and produced a massive text block on each page. This was not inviting to read. Second, the book itself was thin, cheaply made, and a rather unfriendly size. Finally, and most bizarrely, the bibliography was alphabetized by FIRST NAME. This is not standard in the Cambridge Elements series and suggest haste or simple carelessness in production.

I’m not naive and recognize that the Cambridge Elements series is designed to make profits for Cambridge University Press and mostly as a digital subscription service for libraries. This doesn’t even really bother me, but I do with that they did a bit more to obscure the corner cutting. This book had too much “Routledge” in its Cambridge.