Showing papers on "Orientalism published in 1992"

Orientalist Variations on the Theme "Balkans": Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics

Abstract: At first we were confused. The East thought that we were West, while the West considered us to be East. Some of us misunderstood our place in this clash of currents, so they cried that we belong to neither side, and others that we belong exclusively to one side or the other. But I tell you, Irinej, we are doomed by fate to be the East on the West, and the West on the East, to acknowledge only heavenly Jerusalem beyond us, and here on earth-no one. –St. Sava to Irinej, 13th century Since the early 1980s, the crisis of Yugoslav society has been brought to public awareness through discussions in the mass media, both within Yugoslavia and outside of the country. While the causes of the crisis were initially analyzed within the framework of the ideology of Yugoslav self-management socialism, the past several years have seen increasing use by politicians and writers from the northwestern parts of the country of an orientalist rhetoric that relies for its force on an ontological and epistemological distinction between (north)west and (south)east

After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World

Abstract: Over the last decade, studies of ‘third world’ histories and cultures have come to draw to a very considerable extent upon the theoretical perspectives provided by poststructuralism and postmodernism. With the publication in 1978 of Edward Said's work, Orientalism, these perspectives—now fused and extended into a distinctive amalgam of cultural critique, Foucauldian approaches to power, engaged ‘politics of difference,’ and postmodernist emphases on the decentered and the heterogeneous—began to be appropriated in a major way for the study of non-European histories and cultures. Certainly in our own field of Indian colonial history, Said's characteristic blending of these themes has now become virtually a paradigm for a new generation of historians and anthropologists. These directions have been most recently and sharply endorsed in Gyan Prakash's discussion, ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography.’

Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms

Abstract: Examining and historicizing the concept of "otherness" in both literature and criticism, Lisa Lowe explores representations of non-European cultures in British and French writings from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Lowe traces the intersections of culture, class, and sexuality in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and discusses tropes of orientalism, racialism, and romanticism in Flaubert. She then turns to debates in Anglo-American and Indian criticism on Forster's Passage to India and on the utopian projection of China in the poststructuralist theories of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes and in the journal Tel Quel.

Occidentalism: the world turned upside‐down

Abstract: Recently, anthropology has been criticized for the distorted way that it constructs and presents alien societies. While these criticisms have been made before (for example, in Asad 1973), the recent debate springs from Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), a critical description of the discipline of Oriental studies. This discipline, like anthropology, has aimed to develop knowledge of a set of societies different from the Western societies that have been home to the scholars who have pursued that knowledge. Said's criticism is extensive, but central to it are two points about the image of the Orient that Western academics have produced and presented. First, that image stresses the Orient's radical separation from and opposition to the West. Second, that image invests the Orient with a timeless essentialism. Of radical separation and opposition, Said says that Orientalism presents an Orient "absolutely different . . . from the West," that Orientalists have "promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, 'us') and the strange (the Orient, the East, 'them')" (1978:96, 43). Said identifies political and economic reasons for the concern with difference and opposition. However, he also points to a less contingent reason, saying that such concern helps "the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is closer to it and what is far away" (1978:55). Said's charge can be applied to much anthropology with little modification.1 Anthropology is the discipline that, more than any other, seeks out the alien, the exotic, the distant-as did Malinowski in the Trobriands and EvansPritchard among the Nuer. With political changes in the Third World, economic changes in Western universities, and intellectual changes in anthropology, this sort of research has become less possible and less necessary. However, for many anthropologists "real" research still seems to mean village fieldwork in exotic places (see, for example, Bloch 1988). Moreover, when anthropologists are exhorted to expand their disciplinary horizons, they are frequently told to look to history, which studies societies distant in time, not to sociology, which studies those close in place and time. When anthropologists do study Western societies, they are likely to focus on the marginal, the distant: rural villages in the Mediterranean basin, in Appalachia, on the Celtic fringe (see generally Herzfeld 1987).2 Of course some anthropologists do study central areas of life in industrial societies. Some recent published examples, drawn at random, include studies of notions of parenthood (Modell 1986), of the social nature

Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages

Abstract: In this book Bernard Smith explores in more depth the issues first dealt with in his classic European Vision and the South Pacific. He continues his careful examination of how European artists and scientists travelling to the Pacific during the time of Cook's voyages were stimulated to see the world in new and creative ways. In analysing intensely personal responses to a newly accessible environment, Bernard Smith shows how science, topography and travel had an impact on current pictorial genres, how an empirical naturalism affected long-standing classical conventions, and how difficult it was for the artists to portray people and places they knew little about. Smith's scrutiny of the pictorial and documentary evidence results in some surprising findings. He argues that the obligation science placed on art to provide information was a factor in the triumph of Impressionism during the late nineteenth century. He points out, for example, that William Hodges, Cook's official artist on his second voyage to the Pacific, was one of the first artists to adopt plein-air methods of painting. Describing the impact of the Pacific world on burgeoning English Romanticism, Smith tells of the crucial influence of Cook's astronomer, William Wales, on S.T. Coleridge's imaginative development. He describes how John Webber's apparently documentary art was fashioned to suit political concerns. He examines critically the relevance of Edward Said's Orientalism for our understanding of European perceptions of the Pacific. With its breadth of vision and attention to detail, its exploration of the complex relationship between the pursuit of knowledge and the exercise of power, Imagining the Pacific will takeits place alongside Bernard Smith's earlier work as a milestone in historical scholarship and a major contribution to an understanding of the development of European art.

Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918--Sexuality, Religion and Work

Abstract: List of Plates - List of Abbreviations - List of Figures and Tables - Note on Transcription - Acknowledgements - Preface to the Second Edition - Introduction - PART 1: ORIENTALISM, TRAVEL AND GENDER - A Prosopography of Travel, 1763-1914 - PART 2: THE WOMEN'S HAREM: AUTONOMY, SEXUALITY AND SOLIDARITY - Harem Literature, 1763-1914: Tradition and Innovation - 1717-89: The Eighteenth-Century Harem, Lady Montagu, Lady Craven and the Genealogy of Comparative 'Morals', 'Noveltie' and Tradition - Exorcising Sheherezad: The Victorians and the Harem Changes in Sensibilities - The Haremlik as a Bourgeois Home: Autonomy, Community and Solidarity - PART 3: EVANGELISING THE ORIENT: WOMEN'S WORK AND THE EVOLUTION OF EVANGELICAL ETHNOGRAPHY - Evangelical Travel and the Evangelical Construction of Gender - The Women of Christ Church: Work, Literature and Community in Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem - 'Domestic Life in Palestine': Evangelical Ethnography, Faith and Prejudice - Feminising the Landscape - PART 4: A SECULAR GEOGRAPHY OF THE ORIENT: AUTHORITY, GENDER AND TRAVEL - Harriet Martineau's Anti-Pilgrimage: Autobiography, History and Landscape - Queen Hatasu's Beard, Amelia Edwards, the Scientific Journey and the Emergence of the First Female 'Orientalists' - An 'Orientalist' Couple: Anne Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and the Pilgrimage to Nejd - Appendixes - Notes - Bibliography - Index

Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism

Abstract: Sir William Jones Robert Southey and the oriental renaissance Thomas Moore and orientalism James Mill's "The History of British India" susceptible imaginations Mill's "History" as a "classic in the history of Philistinism".

Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse: "He Shang" in Post-Mao China

Abstract: In the years since its introduction, Edward Said's celebrated study Orientalism has acquired a near-paradigmatic status as a model of the relationships between Western and non-Western cultures. Said seeks to show how Western imperialist images of its colonial others-images that, of course, are inevitably and sharply at odds with the self-understanding of the indigenous non-Western cultures they purport to represent-not only govern the West's hegemonic policies, but were imported into the West's political and cultural colonies where they affected native points of view and thus served as instruments of domination themselves. Said's

The Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850-1920

Abstract: List of illustrations Photographic acknowledgements Abbreviations Glossary Preface Introduction 1. Artisans, artists and popular picture production in nineteenth-century Calcutta 2. The art-school artists in Calcutta: professions, practice and patronage in the late nineteenth century 3. Indigenous commercial enterprise and the popular art market in Calcutta: the emergence of a new Indian iconography 4. Tradition and nationalism in Indian art: art-histories and aesthetic discourse in Bengal in the late nineteenth century 5. Orientalism and the new claims for Indian art: the ideas of Havell, Coomaraswamy, Okakura and Nivedita 6. The contest over tradition and nationalism: differing aesthetic formulations for 'Indian' painting 7. Artists and aesthetics: Abanindranath Tagore and the 'New School of Indian Painting' Epilogue: the twenties Bibliography Index.

Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780-1832

Abstract: "Beyond Romanticism" is a challenge to traditional views of Romanticism as they have developed on both sides of the Atlantic. It provides a sustained critique of "Romantic ideology". The essays engage in debates central to the development of literary studies. These debates have traditionally been under-represented in the study of Romanticism, where the claims of history have not had the same status as in other periods, and where confidence in poetic literary value is still at its height. "Beyond Romanticism" demystifies "the Romantic" by examining the historical development of "Romanticism" and demonstrating how this very aesthetic construction asserted its independence. The essays also examine the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary Romantic discourses, such as mesmerism, Hellenism, orientalism and nationalism. This book should be of interest to postgraduates, undergraduates and academics of English literature, particularly Romantic literature.

‘Entoiling the falconet’: Russian musical orientalism in context

Abstract: This essay originated as a contribution to a symposium organised by the Dallas Opera and Southern Methodist University around the Opera's production of Boro-din's Prince Igor in November 1990. Since many Soviet guests had been invited, the poster and programme book were printed in English and Russian side by side. I found that the word ‘orientalism’ in my title had become tema vostoka – ‘the Eastern theme’ – in translation, even though orientalizm, or more commonly, orientalistika, are perfectly good Russian words (well, Russian words, anyway). It was a sensible precaution. ‘The Eastern theme’ is neutral: from a paper with that phrase in the title one expects inventories, taxonomies, identification of sources, stylistic analysis. ‘Orientalism’ is charged. From a paper with that word in the title one expects semiotics, ideological critique, polemic, perhaps indictment. The translator was quite right to err on the side of innocuousness, rather than saddle me with a viewpoint I might not wish or manage to live up to.

Conversion and Demonism: Colonial Christian Discourse and Religion in Sri Lanka

Abstract: Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, it has been difficult for anthropology to avoid the fact that its own discourse is ever entangled in a whole Western archive. What became clear, of course, was that the categories through which anthropology constructs descriptions and analyses of the social discourses and practices of non-Western peoples are themselves participants in a network of relations of knowledge and power. Interestingly enough, however, whereas the general import of this Foucauldian thesis has now been quickly assimilated, its challenge has hardly been taken up in terms of tracing out the lines of formation of specific anthropological, or, let us say, anthropologized, concepts.

Under the Sign of Orientalism: The West vs. Islam

Abstract: n the last ten years, a rapidly growing mass movement has erupted into the world political scene: an Islamic fundamentalism challenging Western economic, political, and cultural hegemony in its totality. In many Muslim countries today, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, a new radical-popular nationalism is being articulated by a revival of Islamic religious tradition, principles, and rituals. By rewriting modernity as a fake and corrupted world and modernization as a false historical narrative, Islamic fundamentalism has brought to the surface a historically sedimented antagonism, the one between the West and Islam. This antagonism has many different layers and is overdetermined by a series of binary oppositions: reason vs. dogma, democracy vs. despotism, civilization vs. medievalism, modernity vs. tradition, and so on. Our aim here is to locate it historically. The antagonism between the West and Islam is not the expression of an eternal conflict between two separate and irreconcilable worlds. This historical location is quite recent and specific. Whatever the literal content or political tendency of Islamism, its very presence signi-

Places of Mind, Occupied Lands--Edward Said and Philology

Abstract: In Beginnings (1975a) Edward Said set out to revamp Comparative Literature—not in the spirit of creating a new theory but in homage to a literary past. Specifically, 19th- and early 20th-century European philologists like Edward Lane, Ernest Renan, and Raymond Schwab—the stars of Orientalism (1978)—demonstrated the literary methods and styles that allowed critics to play a decisive public and political role. Prevalent arguments over Said's Palestinian identity miss the more crucial aspect of his work, which insistently elaborated how to write and speak as a public person: a prolonged inquiry into the mechanics of being so. Falling neatly between two generations of European emigres to the United States (one philological, the other deconstructive), Said rejected 1980s critical trends, finding in deconstruction an obscure and gullible "system." Theory represented an unwitting echo of the worst aspects of 19th-century philology (Renan's textual "science"). By contrast, it was the humanism of writers like Schw...

Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development of the Shaka Myth

Abstract: Literary practitioners have long been, often uncomfortably, aware of the ambivalently fruitful and constraining rhetorical influences of the past. Writers successively utilize or rebel against traditional tropes, poetic conventions, and narrative norms, balancing cultural depth against individualist innovation, acceptability against rejection, public intelligibility against the opacity of private connotation. By such gestures towards the traditions, literature challenges, upholds, or leaves unquestioned the moral, political, and cultural presuppositions of its day. South African historiography is less aware than it might be of its textuality, in this sense, of its immersion in a similar "anxiety of influence," as Harold Bloom has termed it. Little attention has been paid to its rhetorical lineaments and heritage or to the ways historians have read, used, and departed from one another. This is dramatically illustrated by the case of the historiography of Shaka Zulu (assassinated in 1828). Nowhere else has such poverty of evidence and research spawned such a massively unquestioned, longlived, and monolithic "history." Only in the last decade has the legendary, verbal construction of the Shaka figure been seriously questioned; only in 1991, at an important colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand, was something approaching an academic consensus reached that the mfecane-the notion of Shaka's Zulus as the "storm-center" of a sub-continental explosion of autophagous, black-on-black violence-was no longer a credible vehicle for understanding the early nineteenth century in southern Africa. While debate ensues over how to replace the defunct "mfecane," a darker question remains: why has this central historical event remained unquestioned by white writers for so long? What are the cultural, political, and psychological forces at work, generating and fossilizing the region's most treasured myth? As the success of the recent South African television series Shaka Zulu (1986), and the continued reprinting of E. A. Ritter's novel of the same title (1955) amply demonstrate, the myth is still far from being ousted from the popular imagination; and as recent propaganda by both the Zulu Inkatha movement and Afrikaner right-wingers shows, Shaka remains a politically malleable, even volatile symbol.2 His literary trajectory is coeval with that of the establishment of apartheid, and also closely parallels that of British expansion in South Africa and elsewhere, as Edward Said's analysis of "Orientalism" shows (for Orientalism, read Zulu, even African history):

Said's Orientalism and the Discourse of (Hetero) sexuality

Abstract: The "Orient," writes Edward Said in Orientalism, has provided the West with "its deepest and most recurring images of the Other" (1). By tracing the power/knowledge configurations through which Europeans have historically mapped "otherness" onto the "Orient," Said takes a model of alterity from continental philosophy and deploys it in contemporary American political struggles. "My real argument," he writes, "is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political- intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with 'our' world" (12). "Orientalism" is thus defined by Said as "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (3). The political ramifications of Said's theory of Orientalism for Anglo- American literary and cultural studies are far-reaching. With the publication of Orientalism in 1978 and his introduction of the discourse of Orientalism into the critical lexicon of American academia Sai...

Georges Bizet: Carmen : Images of race, class and gender in nineteenth-century French culture

Abstract: Bizet's Carmen has often been understood as a story of ill-fated love between two equal parties whose destinies happen to clash But to read the opera in this fashion is to ignore the faultlines of social power that organize it, for while the story's subject matter may appear idiosyncratic to us, Carmen is actually only one of a large number of fantasies involving race, class and gender that circulated in nineteenth-century French culture Thus before exploring the opera on its own terms, we need to reexamine the critical tensions of its original context – the context within which it was written and first received – as well as the politics of representation: who creates representations of whom, with what imagery, towards what ends? Musicologists have long recognized Carmen's exoticism as one of its most salient features, but they usually treat that exoticism as unproblematic Indeed, until quite recently, most of the exotic images and narratives that proliferate in Western culture were regarded as innocent: the “Orient” (first the Middle East, later East Asia and Africa) seemed to serve merely as a “free zone” for the European imagination Edward Said, however, has shown that this “free zone” was always circumscribed by political concerns Some of these were relatively benign In the eighteenth century, for instance, the “Orient” offered a vantage point from which French writers could criticize their own society Thus Rousseau addressed the East as a Utopian philosopher contemplating alternatives with the West, and Montesquieu adopted the persona of a Persian traveler writing letters home about the odd social practices he encounters in Paris

Toward a cultural history of America

Abstract: [First paragraph]Caliban and otheressays, by ROBERTO FERNANDEZ RETAMAR. (Translatedby Edward Baker, Foreword by Fredric Jameson.) Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1989. xvi + 139 pp. (Cloth US $35.00, Paper US$14.95)Deconstructing America: representations of the other, by PETER MASON.London: Routledge, 1990. vii + 216 pp. (Cloth £ 30.00)Both these books beiong to a field of study that aims to analyze the ways in which Europe, or more generally the West, has represented to itself in words and images the non-European world. Edward Said's Orientalism inaugurated that field in 1978, immediately constituting a corpus of work through its author's recognition of precedent and analogue, then acting as indispensable touchstone to the subsequent development of the field during the 1980s. Although Said's work deals with the orient, however defined, a surprising amount of ideological analysis of colonial representation had already taken place within the Caribbean. Frantz Fanon, Eric Williams, and Aime Cesaire were three notable precursors recognized by Said; and Roberto Fernendez Retamar's essays, especially those written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, pursued many similar themes within the rather different context of the Cuban Revolution. Four of those essays are now published in English, along with a more recent reflection on the most famous of them, "Caliban."

From Traveler to Notable: Lady Duff Gordon in Upper Egypt, 1862-1869

Abstract: The nineteenth-century British traveler to Egypt enacted an intercultural exchange dominated by Orientalism, " kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient."1 The purpose of travel usually directly reflected this domineering objective?trade, war, diplomacy?and most of the people who undertook it were men. Scholarly interest in women travelers has grown in recent years, raising the question of how western women participated in the process of empire building.2 The best of this literature parallels and even melds with the kinds of questions raised by the scholarship on Orientalism, emphasizing the ways in which travelers created situations and metaphors that reflected more upon their own society than on the ones they sought to conquer.3 But just as the study of Orientalism has ultimately challenged scholars to move beyond Eurocentrism

Orientalism and the Heroic Other in Racine's Alexandre le Grand: A Homeric Intertext

Abstract: A s Edward Said observes, orientalism has a strong affinity with intertextuality: a text representing the Orient is at least in part a reading of other texts representing the Orient. This general rule is certainly applicable to the works of Jean Racine, but—as is frequently the case with this neoclassical master of deceptive appearances—in a rather unexpected way. Bajazet, the most obvious example of an orien­ talist text in Racine’s œuvre and the play that has received the greatest amount of attention in terms of its representation of the Orient, does not lend itself to being read as a reading of other orientalist texts. Bajazet, a play set in Constantinople, is based on nearly contemporary events that Racine claims to have heard narrated by the French ambassador upon his return to France.2 In her discussion of the intertextual relation of Bajazet with two subsequent works, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress, Kate Trumpener demonstrates the “ fundamentally intertextual nature of these stories” and links their intertextuality, following Said, with the texts’ orientalist content.3 But for obvious reasons, Trumpener connects Bajazet only with later works, for the play is unique among Racine’s tragedies in that its contemporary setting and its purported lack of written sources4 make it difficult to establish intertextual links with previous works, be they literary, historical, or sacred texts.5 In fact, the links between orientalism and intertextuality are far more interesting in a number of Racine’s tragedies that might not be immedi­ ately identifiable as orientalist texts. The Orient is a prevalent topos in Racine’s tragedy; five of his eleven tragedies are set in the Orient, and in the six plays set in Europe, several crucial characters are Asian, most prominently Andromaque and Bérénice. Even Eriphile in Iphigénie, although she turns out to be the daughter of Helen and Theseus, is