Orientalizing Oklahoma

In his 1979 book Orientalism, Edward Said described "Orientalization" as a process, whereby concrete and palpable people and places are transformed, through the act of writing, painting (and in the modern era, via film), into ideas.

The "Orient," wrote Said, in reference to the geographical East/non-West, was less of a geographical reality, and more of a concept imagined by the West, particularly the imperialist West of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

In Orientalism, we see the dark side of rendering real geographies into ideas--they could be then treated like ideas, flung around from text to text and projected on to, thereby creating asymmetrical relationships of power between those who represent and those who are represented.

So when I read of Imaginary Oklahoma, a collection of short fiction on Oklahoma composed by writers who have never visited the place, but have the power to imagine it into existence through words, I thought of the fate of the real Oklahoma as hanging in the proverbial balance--between becoming an idea and then appropriated for other uses.

But I'm wrong, Oklahoma is in no danger of being Orientalized out of contention as a real place. The collection has been praised in the Paris Review as an exemplar of writing space (and time) in an innovative way and making the idea of Oklahoma surprisingly palpable.

The best stories in the collection are those that deal with the ghosts of Oklahoma's bloody past, i.e. the history of the displaced and deceived Indian tribes. The modern state of Oklahoma is conceptualized in these stories as a palimpsest that rests on the other geography, which needs to be seen and felt as well.