Minor Orientalism: Spain in James Joyce's Ulysses

Abstract

Abstract James Joyce's Ulysses is rife with Western fantasies about the East: seductive odalisques, damsels with dulcimers, exotic medinas dotted with carpet shops. In invoking them, however, Joyce disarms what Edward Said called Orientalism, or Europe's imperialist stereotypes about Asia and North Africa. Postcolonial critics have seen in Joyce's reformulation of Orientalism an example of his rejection of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and colonialism in Ireland and elsewhere. This essay expands and complicates this scholarly narrative through an examination of Orientalized images of Spain in the novel. A European yet Orientalized country like Ireland, Spain offers Joyce a point of reference to contextualize marginalized national identities beyond colonizer-colonized tensions. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the “minor,” I show how Joyce's engagement with Spain can be conceptualized as a form of Orientalism that decouples Irish identity from British imperialism and the anticolonial nativism that pervaded the Irish Free State after it was established in 1922, the year Ulysses was published.