Showing papers on "Orientalism published in 1993"

Culture and Imperialism

Abstract: From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to the media coverage of the Gulf War, this is an account of the roots of imperialism in European culture. While many historians and commentators have analyzed the phenomenon of the imperial power wielded by Britain (and France) in the 19th century, this book analyzes its impact on the culture of the period. The author focusses on the way this cultural legacy has embedded itself in the Western view of the East, and affects our relationship with the formerly colonized world at every level, both social and political. The author also wrote "Orientalism".

Islam and the West

Abstract: Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies," Bernard Lewis has been for half a century one of the West's foremost scholars of Islamic history and culture, the author of over two dozen books, most notably The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Political Language of Islam, and The Muslim Discovery of Europe Eminent French historian Robert Mantran has written of Lewis's work: "How could one resist being attracted to the books of an author who opens for you the doors of an unknown or misunderstood universe, who leads you within to its innermost domains: religion, ways of thinking, conceptions of power, culture-an author who upsets notions too often fixed, fallacious, or partisan" In Islam and the West, Bernard Lewis brings together in one volume eleven essays that indeed open doors to the innermost domains of Islam Lewis ranges far and wide in these essays He includes long pieces, such as his capsule history of the interaction-in war and peace, in commerce and culture-between Europe and its Islamic neighbors, and shorter ones, such as his deft study of the Arabic word watan and what its linguistic history reveals about the introduction of the idea of patriotism from the West Lewis offers a revealing look at Edward Gibbon's portrait of Muhammad in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (unlike previous writers, Gibbon saw the rise of Islam not as something separate and isolated, nor as a regrettable aberration from the onward march of the church, but simply as a part of human history); he offers a devastating critique of Edward Said's controversial book, Orientalism; and he gives an account of the impediments to translating from classic Arabic to other languages (the old dictionaries, for one, are packed with scribal errors, misreadings, false analogies, and etymological deductions that pay little attention to the evolution of the language) And he concludes with an astute commentary on the Islamic world today, examining revivalism, fundamentalism, the role of the Shi'a, and the larger question of religious co-existence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews A matchless guide to the background of Middle East conflicts today, Islam and the West presents the seasoned reflections of an eminent authority on one of the most intriguing and little understood regions in the world

Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia

Abstract: In his extraordinarily influential book "Orientalism," Edward Said argued that Western knowledge about the Orient in the Post-Enlightenment period has been "a systematic discourse by which Europe was able to manage--even produce--the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively." According to Said, European and American views of the Orient created a reality in which the Oriental was forced to live. Although Said's work deals primarily with discourse about the Arab world, much of his argument has been applied to other regions of "the Orient."Drawing on Said's book, Carol A. Breckenridge, Peter van der Veer, and the contributors to this book explore the ways colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped past and present Indian reality.One common theme that links the essays in "Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament" is the proposition that Orientalist discourse is not just restricted to the colonial past but continues even today. The contributors argue that it is still extremely difficult for both Indians and outsiders to think about India in anything but strictly Orientalist terms. They propose that students of society and history rethink their methodologies and the relation between theories, methods, and the historical conditions that produced them."Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament" provides new and important insights into the cultural embeddedness of power in the colonial and postcolonial world.

Reading the Literatures of Asian America

Abstract: Acknowledgments Foreword Elaine H. Kim Introduction Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling Part I: Ambivalent Identities 1. The Ambivalent American: Asian American Literature on the Cusp Shirley Geok-lin Lim 2. Versions of Identity in Post-Activist Asian American Poetry George Uba 3. Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile Oscar V. Campomanes 4. Beyond "Clay Walls": Korean American Literature Chung-Hei Yun 5. Witnessing the Japanese Canadian Experience in World War II: Processual Structure, Symbolism, and Irony in Joy Kogawa's Obasan Cheng Lok Chua Part II: Race and Gender 6. Ethnicizing Gender: An Exploration of Sexuality as Sign in Chinese Immigrant Literature Sau-ling Cynthia Wong 7. Rebels and Heroines: Subversive Narratives in the Stories of Wakako Yamauchi and Hisaye Yamamoto Stan Yogi 8. Facing the Incurable: Patriarchy in Eat a Bowl of Tea Ruth Y. Hsiao 9. "Don't Tell": Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and the Woman Warrior King-Kok Cheung 10. Tang Ao in America: Male Subject Positions in China Men Donald C. Goellnicht Part III: Borders and Boundaries 11. Sense of Place, History, and the Concept of the "Local" in Hawaii's Asian/Pacific American Literatures Stephen H. Sumida 12. Momotaro's Exile: John Okada's No-No Boy Gayle K. Fujita Sato 13. Blue Dragon, White Tiger: The Bicultural Stance of Vietnamese American Literature Renny Christopher 14. From Isolation to Integration: Vietnamese Americans in Tran Dieu Hang's Fiction Qui-Phiet Tran 15. South Asia Writes North America: Prose Fictions and Autobiographies from the Indian Diaspora Craig Tapping Part IV: Representations and Self-Representations 16. Creating One's Self: The Eaton Sisters Amy Ling 17. The Production of Chinese American Tradition: Displacing American Orientalist Discourse David Leiwei Li 18. Clashing Constructs of Reality: Reading Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book as Indigenous Ethnography Patricia Lin 19. The Death of Asia on the American Field of Representation James S. Moy 20. Ping Chong's Terra In/Cognita: Monsters on Stage Suzanne R. Westfall Notes on Contributors

‘Orientalism’ and its critics

Abstract: (1993). ‘Orientalism’ and its critics. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 145-163.

American transcendentalism and Asian religions

Abstract: 1. Introduction: Transcendentalism and the Orient 2. Predecessors: The First Meetings of East and West The German Tradition and the East The English Romantics and the Orient Fair Joseph Priestley: Moses and the Hindoos 3. Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and the Orient Emerson's "Asia Mine" Thoreau Sauntering Eastward Alcott's Universal Bible 4. The Dissenters: Melville and Brownson Melville as Gnostic Orestes Brownson and Tradition 5. The Ambience: Orientalism in General-Interest American Magazines The Popular Climate West and East Concluding Remarks 6. Ambience and Embodiment of Transcendental Dreams Converting the World Images of America's Golden Age Transcendental Dreams and Earthly Fiction 7. Transcendentalist Periodicals and the Orient Literary Religion and Social Reform: The Western Messenger, The Dial, The Present, The Harbinger, and The Spirit of the Age The Universal and the Particular: The Cincinnati Dial, The Radical, The Index, and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy 8. Patterns in Literary Religion: The Orient and the Second Cycle of Transcendentalism Beginnings: Lydia Maria Child and The Progress of Religious Ideas Unitarian Transcendentalism: James Freeman Clarke and Elizabeth Peabody Universal Religion: John Weiss and Samuel Johnson The Sympathetic Universalism of William Rounseville Alger Octavius Brooks Frothingham's Religion of Humanity and Moncure Conway's Anthropocentrism 9. Conclusion Drawing Conclusions in the Drawing Room Artists and Asia Popular Ramifications The Twentieth Century Bibliography Index

Is Aida an orientalist opera

Abstract: Among the more remarkable events of recent intellectual history is that Edward Said, famous avant-garde literary critic, passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, has begun to write about music. Moreover, not just about any kind of music, but about classical music in the elite (and canonical) European tradition – the symphonies of Beethoven, the operas of Wagner, the chamber music of Schubert and Brahms. Several years ago Said took over the music column in The Nation magazine, and more recently he has published a book, Musical Elaborations, based on a series of invited lectures at the University of California at Irvine.

Reflections on the “Orientalized Orientals”:

Abstract: What we really need is a critical language and a full-scale critical culture, not name calling or the rhetorical equivalent of political murder. Our purpose is to assess and critique power in the Arab world. Not according to grandiose schemas imported from Hegel and Stalin and so on: many of the miseries of the Arab left are ascribable to the importation of methodological instruments or Orientalist models from abroad having no relation to our life. We must ingeniously and imaginatively develop composite or hybrid models of the sort, for example, of Abdallah Laroui in North Africa, or Anwar Abdel Malek. Like-minded individuals have to give such a critique of power greater currency in their discussion. -Edward Said, Intellectuals and the War, 1991.

A Western Invention of Arab Womanhood: The ‘Oriental’ Female

Abstract: I want to look at the traditional ‘orientalising’ invention of Arab women. I begin from the study of Orientalism, traditional and modern, made by Edward Said1 as a general frame in approaching the problem of Arab femininity. Said raises the issue of Arab females deferred;2 this is the first step towards analysing texts featuring and framing Arab women. According to Said, Orientalism is ‘a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and the Occident’.3 Orientalism as a critical discourse offers a valuable understanding of the dynamic of power by which the Arab or ‘Oriental’ individual was constructed and ultimately appropriated by inherently authoritative modes of writing.

The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire; Or, How William Jones Discovered India

Abstract: Celebrated as "the greatest of the Orientalists"' and "undisputed founder"2 of Orientalism, William Jones is best remembered for his discovery of an Indo-European family of languages. Although he was not the first to notice that Sanskrit resembled Greek and Latin, he was the first to be credited with the comparative method that gave birth to a modern science of philology. Jones's so-called discovery, and the science to which it gave birth, signals the emergence of a discourse sanctioning a colonial expansion into Asia. British colonizers were now able to trace their own heritage back to an ancient civilization of the Indian subcontinent they happened to occupy. The translation of Sanskrit manuscripts prompted the "Oriental renaissance" of Romantic thought and a European fascination with "everything Indian."3

Edward G. Browne and the Iranian constitutional struggle: from academic orientalism to political activism

Abstract: According to the few available cursory biographical accounts of Edward Granville Browne (1862-1926), a prominent Cambridge Orientalist who was to become the leading British authority on Iran in the years immediately preceding WWI, his initial interest in Iran was a byproduct of the affection he developed for Ottoman Turkey in his youth. In his own words, "It was the Turkish war with Russia in 1877-8 that first attracted my attention to the East."' Having developed an "admiration" for Turkey at the age of sixteen, in the process of learning Turkish Browne was to discover "that for further progress . . . some knowledge of Arabic and Persian was requisite."2 Thus began what was to become his lifelong fascination with the Persian language and Iran. In 1912, at a mass meeting organized in London to protest British and Russian policies in Iran in the aftermath of the Bakhtiari coup and the closure of the second Majlis (national assembly), the despondent Browne, who by then had spent over 5 years propagating the virtues of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, spoke of Iran as "the country which I love after my own nation better than any nation in the world."3

An Interview with Edward W. Said

Abstract: Said: Well, the closest parallel, I think, is with Orientalism, because I had actually thought of this book as a sequel to Orientalism. I started writing it almost immediately after Orientalism was published and after the initial responses in the form of reviews, and so on, came in. At the time, I thought that what I wanted to do was to write something that would deal with some of the problems in Orientalism. In fact, I did write an essay called "Orientalism Reconsidered," which I had originally thought of publishing as a kind of appendix to this book and which was in the nature of a response to

Voicing slavery through silence: narrative mutiny in Melville's Benito Cereno

Abstract: If anything can be said to dominate our cultural and historical preoccupations of recent years, it is the need for greater reticence and restraint in portraying the "alien" life of others. This pervasive concern with reticence--with the need to listen to rather than to speak for the cultural experience of other peoples--has become a staple feature of such diverse and influential studies as Edward Said's Orientalism, Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness and Hayden White's The Content of the Form. In countering our inherited (and largely Eurocentric) notions of the East, for example, Said argues that our most important task just now is to overcome the latent imperialism of most Oriental studies, "to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a non-repressive and non-manipulative, perspective." The difficulty of such a task becomes apparent when Said goes on to observe that "one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power" (Orientalism 24). The unusually vexed relation of knowledge and power, and of both to the reticence required by a truly "libertarian" view of other cultures, is one that bears directly on our understanding of Benito Cereno (1855), Melville's fictionalized account of an historical slave-revolt on the high seas. Melville's novella is arguably one of the 19th-century's most searching explorations of America's "peculiar institution," but it is also a work which evidences obvious disdain for any univocal conclusions. To say this is not to accept that Melville's work is "about" irony, ambiguity, indeterminacy, or any other form of fictional open-endedness. As I intend to argue, the indeterminacy that characterizes Benito Cereno derives less from some inherently unstable property of language than from the author's own uneasiness in portraying an oppressed and voiceless other--a reticence reflected in his story's unique configuration as (what I will call) a "mutinous" text. What I think can be urged for Melville, then, is that for his own reasons and in his own way he anticipates a number of ideological concerns which pervade our current thinking about the narrative representation of other times, other cultures and other lives. In the present essay I propose to examine Benito Cereno, both as an embodiment of Melville's anti-slavery sentiment and as a mutinous narrative structure, in an effort to see how structure and idea engage each other. More obviously than any other work by Melville, Benito Cereno is a narrative clotted with "complications"--interpretive gaps and anomalies which seem to defy any clear resolution. These extend, of course, from the atmospheric ambiguity generated by the opening description of the "gray" dawn off the coast of Chile, to the bewildering and often sinister-seeming conduct of Benito Cereno himself. To the extent that these complications derive from the limited point of view of Captain Delano, the putative protagonist, they serve to recall the reader's own experience with the story: in particular, his or her need to transform the text's original opacities into increments of meaning, units of significance that will then contribute to the story's hermeneutic clarity. As a way of focusing this readerly desire, Melville relies in Benito Cereno on one of the most melodramatic plot structures ever to be found in a serious work of fiction. Although the outline of the novella is generally well known, it may prove useful to summarize some of its essential moments--both to indicate the source of its vexing ambiguity and to emphasize the teleological hunger that propels its movement. In August, 1799, while lying at anchor off St. Maria, a deserted island along the southern coast of Chile, Captain Amasa Delano, an American sealer captain from Massachusetts, glimpses in the distance the "shadowy" figure of another ship making its uncertain way toward the island harbor. …

Orientalism in Ragaan: Embassy's Imaginative Geography

Abstract: The political controversy created by the ABC television series 'Embassy' about a fictitious Australian diplomatic mission in an imaginary Islamic country called Ragaan is discussed. The manner in which it used the concepts of Orientalism and 'imaginative geography' to situate the East within Western perceptions characterised by colonial attitudes and the lack of consideration for local sensibilities is analysed.

Masculinity's Severed Self: Gender and Orientalism in Out of Egypt and Running in the Family

Abstract: Both Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt and Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family present problematic representations of a male emigrant's dissociation from his own cultural, racial, and familial heritage. The emigrant's sense of estrangement is intensified by socially constructed codes of masculinity: these codes align the male subject with an orientalist discourse complicit with the neo-colonial ideologies of the West. Hassan's journey "out of Egypt" to the United States exemplifies the ways in which masculine severance cooperates with the politics of neo-colonial imperialism: Hassan's blunt articulation of his desire to be severed from his Egyptian past may reinscribe the Orientalist discourse that simultaneously desires and dismisses the non-West. Running the in Family also foregrounds the male emigrant's severance from his familial and cultural past, but whereas Hassan refuses to return to the past, Ondaatje is fascinated by it. Ondaatje returns (physical and imaginatively) to Sri Lanka to formulate a new understanding of his deceased father; however, in a text fueled by the desire for knowledge of the father -- a bid for a kind of power -- Ondaatje admits failure. The two "autobiographies" articulate the contradictions and slippages that occur in the gender system when the autobiographical subject undergoes the dislocations of racial, national, and cultural identifications.

Constructing Chinese History: Kafka's and Dittmar's Orientalist Discourse

Abstract: which this essay is a part. C HINA IS extraordinarily interested in learning from the German people, Paul Rohrbach writes in a 1916 article, because they are a nation characterized by order, science, and the pursuit of foreign languages and knowledge-or so he was told by a Chinese who had studied in Germany. At the same time, Rohrbach continues, the Germans will never attain "das grof3e Ziel, die Umwandlung des alten in das neue China mit deutschem Geist zu beeinflussen" 'the great goal of influencing through the German spirit the transformation of the old China into the new one' unless they seriously attempt to judge the country by its own historical essence (1 1).1 Although (or precisely because) Rohrbach claims that Germany, having no colonialist interests in China, would like it to be an autonomous and equal partner, his statement is strikingly indicative of that inextricable interrelation between Western political authority and the search for knowledge which is typical of the traditional orientalist discourse about China. Perhaps too briefly defined, the term orientalism here denotes the network of knowledge, power, and writing by which China has for centuries been conceptualized, represented, appreciated, and criticized in Western historiography, fiction, travel literature, and journalism. Its current critical usage derives from Edward Said's seminal study. Relying on Foucault, Said offers this definition, among others:

Orientalism in Early Australian Theatre

Abstract: Australian colonial audiences were avid consumers of Orientalist imagery, which pervaded opera, pantomime, burlesque, Shakespeare drama, melodrama and literature.

Constructing Chinese history: Kafka's and Dittmar's orientalist discourse : Literature and the idea of Europe

Abstract: Comment par l'intermediaire d'un jeu intertextuel avec l'eurocentrisme du discours orientaliste, Kafka propose dans Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer une profonde relecture de l'optimisme imperialiste affirme par J. Dittmar dans Im neuen China

Revising the Word and the World: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism

Abstract: That literature is a form of social action has been an implicit assumption of feminist literary criticism since its emergence in academia some 25 years ago. This assumption has served not only to heighten the awareness of gender construction and response in literature, but also to redefine the process and goals of literary criticism itself. Three interviews with writers of different nationalities (Audre Lorde, Simone de Beauvoir, and Carmen Naranjo) introduce topics echoed in the essays that follow: the interplay between women's writing and feminist theory, the politics of writing, and the roles of race, class, and sexual orientation in artistic production. These issues are engaged on a theoretical level by three essays that represent today's most prominent areas of concern for feminist literary criticism. The theoretical perspectives advanced in this anthology provide models for reading the traditional expressions of women worldwide including oratory and performance as well as literature in the more conventional sense. Contributors include Jane Flax on "Postmodemism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory," Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham on "African-American Women's history and the Metalanguage of Race," Paula Bennett on "Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory," Leslie Rabine on "Social Gender and Symbolic Gender in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston", Joyce Zonana on "Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of lane Eyre", Jane Desmond on "Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis's "Radha" of 1906," Terri Brint Joseph on "Poetry as a Strategy of Power: The Case of Riffian Berber Women," Chikwenye Ogunyemi on "The Contemporary Black Female Novel in English," and Sandra Zagarell on "Narrative of Community."

Health and Society in the Middle East: Past and Present

Abstract: nthropologists' current concern with what Richard Fardon called a "more precise and complex grasp of context" (1990:5) has catalyzed the revitalization of our discipline's historical tradition. The conviction that what we know about history affects how we think about culture (Roseberry 1989) is expressed, inter alia, in the call for taking account of historical political economy (Marcus and Fischer 1986). As an extension of this disciplinary trend, anthropologists of Middle Eastern medical cultures are increasingly turning attention to the past as a guide to understanding the present (e.g., Good and Good 1988; Gruenbaum 1981; Inhor Millar and Lane 1988; Morsy 1992). Researchers who are intent on countering Orientalist essentialism would be well served by the works of medical historians of the region (e.g., Al-Azhary Sonbol 1981; Gallagher 1983; Gran 1979; Rahman 1989). The books by Kuhnke and Gallagher under review here are invaluable in this regard. With chronological boundaries set between the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the British occupation of 1882, the stated purpose of Lavere Kuhnke's book on public health in 19th-century Egypt is investigation of "the clash that occurred between advocates of ... [the] seemingly opposed etiological theories [of contagionism and anticontagionism]" (p. 2). In so doing, Kuhnke goes well beyond abstract etiological explanations to address the social circumstances surrounding their operationalization. Informed by medical historian Erwin Ackerknecht's wisdom, which medical anthropologists have long appreciated, she demonstrates the significance of what he described as "the accident of personal experience and temperament, and especially economic outlook and political loyal-

The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era

Abstract: Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006, pp. 218, hb. £55, ISBN: 07190-71585Atherton and Sanders have brought together ten essays (including their introduction), on a broad perspective of the 1630s. They suggest that the decade is worthy of singular study by proposing that many of our images of the decade are airy chimera blown away by a breath of investigative wind. The decade of peace: shattered by the contentious government, or by the clatter of arms in the hands of drilling militia; the period of extra-parliamentary rule: meaningless in Ireland or Scotland where parliaments met in the decade. And they are right to do so. This is a battleground not only for the embattled puritans or the bastions of social peace and order, but for historians and other scholars drawn to the last years of pre-revolutionary England.Malcolm Smuts looks at the challenges facing Charles I's government and how it was perceived and sees much to connect the aims of the soon-to-be royalists and parliamentarians: differences centred on approach not aims. John Peacock looks at Charles I's image: how he was portrayed in art, drama and against the backdrop of architecture as a roman emperor. Specific emperors were being regarded as being archetypal good monarchs and Charles during the 30s was being compared to them in masques as well as in the art of Van Dyke. Sarah Poynting is more personal in her approach, looking at the king's correspondence with a close coterie. It was to prove a dangerous liaison: of all his close correspondents only one survived into the 1660s, the rest were dead, some having been executed from 1641 onwards by the king's enemies. Perhaps this is not surprising, as Poynting shows this correspondence was central to extra-parliamentary government and shaped policy and practice. The essay thus provides a useful examination of the mechanics of the king's reign in the 30s. Caroline Hibbard looks at the queen and explores her role: something which is subject to extensive reappraisal in other arenas too at present. The essay is broader than the title suggests as the exploration is as much about Henrietta Maria's court in the 30s and the multifaceted relations within the wider court in general. It is, like the foregoing essay, a very useful study of dynamics.James Knowles and Karen Britland look at drama during the period; the former at orientalism in masques and the latter at Thomas May's Antigone. …

Islams and modernities

Abstract: This title challenges romantic, a historic and irreconcilable notions of Islamic and Western cultures, highlighting the plurality of both. Frequently portrayed as intolerant, medieval and barbaric, Islam has replaced Communism as the main perceived threat to Western civilization and values. For Aziz al-Azmeh, this Orientalist and racist view of Islam is nothing but a mirror image of the myth propagated by Islamic fundamentalists, with both resting on an ahistorical conception of an unchanging religion. In this expanded new edition, al-Azmeh rethinks the relationship between Muslim and Western societies through to the post-9/11 period, uncovering a rich history of interaction and exchange.

Decamps, orientalist intertext, and counter-discourse in Gautier's Constantinople

Abstract: Comment le recit de G., s'appuyant sue de multiples allusions picturales (Delacroix, Gericault mais surtout Decamps) marque l'apogee de l'interet litteraire pour la Turquie, l'orientalisme servant de miroir a l'occident