Showing papers on "Orientalism published in 1998"

Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism

Abstract: In this 1998 book, Meyda Yegenoglu investigates the intersection between post-colonial and feminist criticism, focusing on the Western fascination with the veiled women of the Orient. She examines the veil as a site of fantasy and of nationalist ideologies and discourses of gender identity, analyzing travel literature, anthropological and literary texts to reveal the hegemonic, colonial identity of the desire to penetrate the veiled surface of 'otherness'. Representations of cultural difference and sexual difference are shown to be inextricably linked, and the figure of the Oriental woman to have functioned as the veiled interior of Western identity.

Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, secular criticism, and the question of minority culture

Abstract: Edward Said has never left any doubt as to the significance he attaches to what he calls secular criticism. It is by this term, not postcolonial criticism, that he identifies his critical practice as a whole. The meaning of this term is a theme he has returned to repeatedly since first elaborating it at length in the introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic. But this facet of the Saidian project has received nothing like the attention that, for instance, has been lavished upon the concept of Orientalism or the strategy of what he calls contrapuntal reading. Nor does it seem to have been productive for younger scholars in quite the same way as these two latter conceptual constellations. There may even appear to be something odd about the persistence of this concern in Said's work, at least within the context of the Anglo-American academy. Could all this conceptual and

Romanticism and colonialism : writing and empire, 1780-1830

Abstract: 1. Romanticism and colonialism: texts, contexts, issues Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson 2. Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1785-1800 Peter J. Kitson 3. Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1800-1830 Tim Fulford 4. Accessing India: orientalism, anti-'Indianism', and the rhetoric of Jones and Burke Michael J. Franklin 5. 'Sunshine and Shady Groves': what Blake's 'Little Black Boy' learned from African writers Lauren Henry 6. Blood sugar Timothy Morton 7. 'Wisely Forgetful': Coleridge and the politics of pantisocracy James C. McKusick 8. Darkness visible?: race and representation in Bristol abolitionist poetry, 1770-1810 Alan Richardson 9. Fictional constructions of liberated Africans Moira Ferguson 10. 'Wandering through Eblis': absorption and containment in Romantic exoticism Nigel Leask 11. The Isle of Devils: the Jamaican journal of M. G. Lewis D. L. Macdonald 12. Indian jugglers: Hazlitt, Romantic orientalism, and the difference of view John Whale 13. 'Some samples of the finest orientalism': Byronic philhellenism and proto-Zionism at the time of the congress of Vienna Caroline Franklin 14. 'Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee ...': Byron's Venice and oriental empire Malcolm Kelsall 15. The plague of imperial desire: Montesquieu, Gibbon, Brougham, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man Joseph W. Lew.

U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890

Abstract: US Orientalisms is the first extensive and politicized study of nineteenth-century American discourses that helped build an idea of nationhood with control over three Orients: the Barbary Orient; the Orient of Egypt; and the Orient of India The book begins with an examination of the literature of the Barbary Orient generated by the US-Algerian conflict in the late eighteenth century in the works of such writers as Royall Tyler, Susanna Rowson, and Washington Irving It then moves on to the Near East Orientalist literature of the nineteenth century in light of Egyptology, theories of race, and the growth of missionary fervor in writers such as John DeForest, Maria Susanna Cummins, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Harriet Prescott Spofford Finally, Schueller considers the Indic Orientalism of the period in the context of Indology, British colonialism, and the push for Asian trade in the United States, focusing particularly on Emerson and Whitman US Orientalisms demonstrates how these writers strove to create an Orientalism premised on the idea of civilization and empire moving west, from Asia, through Europe, and culminating in the New World

Orientalism and Musical Style

Abstract: In Western music, Orientalist styles have related to previous Orientalist styles rather than to Eastern ethnic practices, just as myths have been described by L6vi-Strauss as relating to other myths.1 One might ask if it is necessary to know anything about Eastern musical practices; for the most part, it seems that only a knowledge of Orientalist signifiers is required. In the case of Orientalist operas, I had at first thought it might be important to understand where they were set geographically. Then I began to realize that, for the most part, all I needed to know was the simple fact that they were set in exotic, foreign places. Perhaps I should have remembered Edward Said's advice that "we need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the Orient and the Orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but because it is not even trying to be accurate. What it is trying to do ... is at one and the same time to characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe."2 Nevertheless, the state of affairs found in a work like Rameau's Les Indes galantes (1735), where, for example, Persians are musically indistinguishable from Peruvians, was to change. Distinctions and differences developed in the representation of the exotic or cultural Other, and that, as well as the confusion that sometimes results, is my present concern. This confusion is most evident in the nineteenth century, when Western composers, especially those working in countries engaged in imperialist expansion, were torn between, on the one hand, making a simple distinction between Western Self and Oriental Other, and on the other, recognizing that there was no single homogeneous Oriental culture. Thus, even when different Orientalist styles had become established, they could sometimes be applied in a careless manner. In this article, because of its broad span, I am looking primarily for changes in representation. As a caveat, I should stress that in a genealogical critique such as this, a smooth linear narrative is impossible, and owing to the contingent nature of developments in Orientalist styles, a certain amount of lurching around on my part is unavoidable.

Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism

Abstract: Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism, by Mehrzad Boroujerdi. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996. xix + 181 pages. Append. to p. 215. Gloss. to p. 219. Bibl. to p. 240. Index to p. 256. $45 cloth; $16.95 paper. Reviewed by Abbas Milani In spite of the significant role Iranian intellectuals have played in shaping the debate of 20th-century politics and culture in Iran, hitherto no systematic account of their role has been published in either English or Persian. Iranian Intellectuals and the West is a welcome attempt to fill this gaping lacuna. After an introductory theoretical chapter articulating the book's central concepts, and after a brief discussion of the nature of the Pahlavi regime as a "rentier state" ("a state that derives a substantial portion of its revenue on a regular basis from payments by foreign concerns in the form of rent," p. 25), the narrative's other five chapters are, in essence, brief sketches of the work of an eclectic assortment of Iranian intellectuals in the post- World War II era. A few, like Al-e Ahmad, Hamid Enayat, `Ali Shari`ati, Daryush Shaygan and Sayyid Nasr, are known to the more serious English-speaking students of Iranian culture and politics. Others, like Sayyid Fakhroddin Shadman, Ahmad Fardid, Reza Davari and `Abd al-Karim Soroush, have been less discussed in Western scholarly literature. The book also includes a rather odd 30-page "Appendix" that offers, in large type and in a single slender column, a list of personal information about Iranian intellectuals. The value of such an appendix, scholarly or otherwise, is questionable. The book's central thesis is that a form of nativism, or an "admixture of anti-Westernization, antidictatorship, antidependency, and Third Worldist rhetoric" (p. 178), has combined with "orientalism in reverse"-a discourse of power that "bases its claims to truth on such normative fields as theology, mythology, mysticism, ethics and poetry" (p. 13)-to permeate much of the intellectual discourse in Iran. Before the 1979 revolution, nativism played a formative role in the "social construction of the West as the 'other' " (p. 53) and in defining the nature of the relationship between the state and intellectuals in Iran. With time, clerics and secular intellectuals came to see not only the West but also the Pahlavi regime as the "other," and were caught in a "dichotomous thinking" that vacillated between "a state of fraudulent 'modernism' or a nativistic impasse" (p. 181). With the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, this nativism changed from "the acculturated response of disenchanted intellectuals to ... the hegemonic discourse of a revolutionary elite" (p. 179). Fashioning into a short, 180-page narrative the long, polyphonic 50-year history of intellectual development in Iran is perilous territory few scholars would dare to tread. …

Feminism, imperialism and orientalism: the challenge of the ‘Indian woman’

Abstract: This article examines the content and process of imperialist discourse on the ‘Indian woman’ in the writings of two North American women, one writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, the other a key exponent of the ‘second wave’ of the movement. By analysing these writings, it demonstrates how the content of the discourse was reproduced over time ith different but parallel effects in the changed political circumstances, in the first case producing the Western imperial powers as superior on the scale of civilisation, and in the second case producing Western women as the leaders of global feminism. It also identifies how the process of creating written images occurred within the context of each author's social relations with the subject, the reader and the other authors, showing how an orientalist discourse can be produced through the author's representation of the human subjects of whom she writes; how this discourse can be reproduced through the author's uncritical use of earlier writers; an...

The Victorians and Race

Abstract: Race, science and culture - historical continuities and discontinuities, 1850-1914, Douglas A. Lorimer images of otherness and the visual production of difference - race and labour in illustrated texts, 1850-1865, Tim Barringer black and white? Viewing Cleopatra in 1862, Mary Hamer the inner and outer - Dalip Singh as an Eastern stereotype in Victorian England, Simeran Man Singh Gell race and the social plot in "The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Tim Dolin the half-breed as Gothic unnatural, H.L. Malchow the colonized in the colonies - representation of Celts in Victorian battle painting, Joseph A. Kestner "principle, party and protest" - the language of Victorian Orangeism in the north of England, Donald M. MacRaild reinventing origins - the Victorian Arthur and racial myth, Inga Bryden shuttling and soul making - tracing the links between Algeria and egalitarian feminism in the 1850s, Deborah Cherry other women and new women - writing race and gender in "The Story of an African Farm", Anita Levy women and orientalism - gendering the racial gaze, Reina Lewis "tracing the route to England" - the 19th-century Caribbean interventions into English debates on race and slavery, Helen M. Cooper.

Orientalism transposed : the impact of the colonies on British culture

Abstract: Colonialism transposed the "Easternization" of Britain and interventions to colonial discourse, Julie F Codell, Dianne Sachko Macleod Part 1 Identity, agency and masquerade: resistance and performance - native informant discourse in the biographies of Maharajah Sayaji Rao III of Baroda, 1863-1939, Julie F Codell about face - Sir David Wilkie's portraits of Mehmet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, Emily Weeks cross-culture cross-dressing - class, gender and modernist sexual identity, Dianna Sachko Macleod Part 2 The aesthetics of the colonial gaze: the Memsahib's brush - Anglo-Indian women and the art of the picturesque, 1830-1880, Romita Ray to see or not to see - conflicting eyes in the travel art of Augustus Earle, Leonard Bell beyond the stretch of labouring thought sublime - romanticism, post-colonial theory and the transmission of Sanskrit texts, Kathryn S Freeman Cameron's photographic double takes, Jeff Rosen Part 3 Intercoloniality: death, glory, empire - art, Barbara Groseclose Tipu Sultan of Mysore and British medievalism in the paintings of Mather Brown, Constance C McPhee

The Cosmopolitanism of Commerce and the Allure of Difference: Selfridges, the Russian Ballet and the Tango 1911–1914

Abstract: This article engages with postcolonial theorizations of orientalism and challenges assumptions about the pervasiveness of imperial ideologies in Britain at the beginning of the century by exploring...

Voices from the Margins: Gendered images of ‘Otherness’ in colonial Morocco

Abstract: The main goal of this essay is to study a book- El Marroc sensual i fanatic - of travel writings written by a Catalan woman traveller, and to put it within the context of the recent scholarship that relates, on the one hand, travel narrative with Orientalism and gender and, on the other, geography and colonialism. The contradictory nature of the contents of the book leads us to challenge the notion of simple 'Othering' as presented in Said's works where the heterogeneity of colonial power is neglected in a totalising dichotomy between the colonising Self and the colonising Other. The contemporary Spanish official discourse was indeed pro-colonial and paternalistic and often drew on notions of shared history and geographical proximity in order to legitimise an 'altruistic' colonial presence. The author's position is very different from this official discourse, but is deeply ambivalent. Her ambivalence arises from her gender which allows her to live the last Spanish colonial adventure as an outsider, and al...

Islam's “Strange Secret Sharer”: Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish Question

Abstract: Edward Said's Orientalism has received both praise and criticism. Among the criticisms leveled is the charge that Said's neglect of German scholarship misses an important part of Orientalism in the West. Robert Irwin, for example, notes that German Biblical scholarship was critically influential as a “motivating force for the study of Islam” and that the “German form-critical techniques” developed to study the Old Testament influence on the way “Western scholars interpret[ed] the Koran and the early Islamic community.” Bernard Lewis claims that Said's neglect of German scholarship calls into question his entire project and likens it to writing a history of European music without a discussion of the German contribution. See Robert Erwin, “Writing about Islam and the Arabs,” Ideology and Consciousness, 9 (1981–82), 108–9; Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 108. More generally, critics have noted that the presence of an influential Orientalist scholarship in Germany, as well as the absence of any significant Germany colonies in the Orient, calls into question Said's claim that there is a confluence between scholarship and political power in Orientalist discourse. Neither critics nor supporters, on the other hand, have given much attention to Said's claim that there is a similarity between Orientalism and anti-Semitism. Said states this in his introduction, where he notes that in “addition and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism, and as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch Orientalism resemble each other is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood” (1978:27–28). Elsewhere, Said has faulted critics of his work on Orientalism for seeing “in the critique of Orientalism an opportunity for them to defend Zionism . . . and launch attacks on Palestinian nationalism,” instead of giving attention to the similarity “between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism” (1985:9).

Romanticism and Colonialism: ‘Wandering through Eblis’; absorption and containment in Romantic exoticism

Abstract: THE PHYSICAL PORTRAIT OF THE TROPICS Alexander von Humboldt's huge engraving of the Ecuadorian mountains Chimborazo and Cotopaxi – considered to be the highest in the world – and of the vertical ecology of the Andes, was published in 1807 as the frontispiece to the first volume of his monumental Voyage en Amerique , entitled Essai sur la geographie des plantes, accompagne d'un tableau physique des pays equinoxiales . Humboldt's ‘Physical Portrait of the Tropics’ offers an extreme, but, nevertheless instructive case of the problems of exotic representation in the Romantic period, and of the contradiction between aesthetic affect and topographical information in mediating the non-European world to a European public, greedy for such images of its distant Others. On the one hand, the ‘Physical Portrait’ solicits an aesthetic response to Chimborazo, the partial ascent of which in 1802 had been, perhaps, the most celebrated episode in Humboldt's five-year expedition to Spanish America. Like the best eighteenth-century landscape traveller-artists, Humboldt claimed to have sketched Chimborazo ‘on the spot’; his field sketches, suffused with his own affective response to the sublimity of the mountain, provided the basis for further published engravings in his celebrated Vues des Cordilleres , translated into English by Helen Maria Williams and published in 1814 as Researches concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America, with Descriptions and Views of Some of the most Striking Scenes in the Cordilleras.

Moroccan Colonial Soldiers: Between Selective Memory and Collective Memory

Abstract: OVER THE LAST DECADE, there has been an increasing interest in colonialism as a subject of scholarly inquiry. Whether in the field of anthropology, literary criticism, Feminist studies, or cultural studies, there has been a significant amount of "rethinking" about the colonial past and the politics of colonialism and empires. A new set of concepts such as "post-orientalist," "subaltern," and "post-colonial" which are now in vogue have been more closely associated with the work of the Subaltern Studies Group on colonial India. An interdisciplinary organization of South Asian scholars, the Subaltern Studies Group focused on the histories of the "Subaltern" which Ranajit Guha identifies "as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender, and office or in any other way."1 For the historian to "rethink" may be understood as to challenge accepted paradigms and engage historical research in new directions by using new methodological tools. This has been very much the goal of the Subaltern Study Group: a challenge not only to the orientalist discourse, but also to the nationalist and Marxist conceptualization of colonial India.2 Historians of North Africa have been equally concerned with the impact of colonial expansion on the colonized and its influence on the social and economic organization of indigenous peoples. The colonial history of the Maghrib and the Middle East in general has certainly seen similar challenges and witnessed its own "decolonization" and reevaluation, but not to the same extent and with more theoretical basis, and institutional organization as has been the case in India. French colonialism has often been explained in abstract terms and

Orientalism in Art

Abstract: Nineteenth-century Europe was fascinated by the Orient. Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798 initiated this phenomenon, and its history included the Greek uprising against the Turks in 1821 and the French taking of Algiers in 1830. Artists of the period, too, were captivated by these events, and the rich body of imagery they produced is the subject of this volume.Author Christine Peltre's elegant text retraces Orientalism's artistic history, in which the French and British schools predominated. The high poetry of the Romantics' Orient strove for dramatic effect, as the works of David Roberts, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, and Eugene Delacroix attest. A different brand of imagery was produced by the ethnographic gaze of the century's middle years, practiced by artists such as John Frederick Lewis, Eugene Fromentin, Jean-Leon Gerome, A. D. Ingres, and Adolphe Monticelli. Work of this kind was eventually superseded by a third style, a fusion of European and Eastern elements, as seen in the work of August Macke, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse.Witnesses to a history that they influenced in subtle ways through their imagery, the Orientalist painters also produced a history of their own, that of a spiritual and formal quest to find in the East the ideal of primitive purity. Orientalism in Art covers all these facets, making it an indispensable volume for art historians and anyone with a passion for Orientalist art.

Orientalism and world history: Representing Middle Eastern nationalism and Islamism in the twentieth century

Abstract: This is a essay about framing, about contextualization. It seeks to situate the political and cultural transitions the modern Middle East has undergone in this century in their world historical contexts, the better to help us understand the meanings of the present shift to Islamist forms of politics in the region. It is my contention that scholars have misunderstood the world historical significance of the emergence of nationalism in the area, that they have misconstrued its relationship to orientalism and to the European enlightenment more generally, and (as a result) largely misunderstood the nature of the Islamist challenge. In many ways my reflections here spring from a dissatisfaction with the inadequacies (both epistemological and world historical) of the ways in which some critics of orientalism have located modernity.

Liminalities: Discussions on the Global and the Local

Abstract: In the twenty years since Edward Said, in his landmark study Orientalism, framed debates about cultural identity and the construct of the Other, there have been extraordinary worldwide political, economic, and social realignments; massive migrations and displacements of peoples; and the development of a seemingly borderless electronic communications network. At the same time, there have been intense, and often violent, reassertions of the particularities of cultural, ethnic, and religious identification. Within the context of the arts, the specifics of identity and difference have been the focus of many artists, curators, critics, and historians.

Oriental Prospects.Western Literature and the Lure of the East.

Abstract: Illustrations. Prefatory Note. Introduction: Oriental Prospects. Ton HOENSELAARS: The Elizabethans and the Turk at Constantinople. Garland CANNON: Sir William Jones and Literary Orientalism. El HABIB BENRAHHAL SERGHINI: William Beckford's Symbolic Appropriation of the Oriental Context. C.C. BARFOOT: English Romantic Poets and the Free-Floating Orient. Paul PELCKMANS: Walter Scott's Orient: The Talisman. Gerard TERMORSHUIZEN: In Search of the Noble Savage: Travellers' Accounts in Old Indies Government Journals (1816-1830). Robert DRUCE: The Heathen Chinee and the Yellow Peril: Pseudo-Chinoiserie in Popular Fiction. Joep LEERSSEN: Irish Studies and Orientalism: Ireland and the Orient. Michael BEARD: Recitatif. Willem OTTERSPEER: The Vulnerabilities of an Honest Broker: Edward Said and the Problems of Theory. Ieme van der POEL: Orientalism and the French Left: The Case of Tel Quel and China. William SCHOUPPE: Orientalist Visions and Revisions: Edward Said's Orientalism and Representations of the Orient in Paul Bowles. John THIEME: Cartographical Revisionism in the New Literatures in English. Elleke BOEHMER: Post-Colonial Literary Studies: A Neo-Orientalism? Edward D. GRAHAM: Unquiet on the Western Front: The Orientalism of Contemporary Chinese-American Women Writers. Notes on Contributors. Index.

Valorizing the Present Orientalism, Postcoloniality and the Human Sciences

Abstract: There are many cultures. But only one culture has offered descriptions of other cultures. What are the implications of this fact for the human sciences? Until the appearance of Edward Said's Orientalism, the human sciences did not find it necessary to interrogate either the status of these descriptions or the culture that offered them. The western descriptions of other cultures have recently been contested by postcolonial theory/discourse which has not, however, looked into the culture that produced the descriptions. Valorizing the present in India (and other postcolonial cultures), this paper argues, requires us to take a road that neither Said nor postcolonial discourse has taken: namely, reconceptualizing the human sciences by theorizing the experience of the non-western cultures and, as a prerequisite to it, theorizing the West.

"Araby" in Context: The "Splendid Bazaar," Irish Orientalism, and James Clarence Mangan

Abstract: The story based on an actual incident in Joyce's life, "Araby," is often read on a single internal plane for its quest symbolism, its allegory of creativity, or its richness of style. But "Araby" also draws significantly upon three external contexts, namely the histori cal, the literary, and the biographical. Although it may seem a work of independent invention, "Araby" refers directly to an actual bazaar that visited Dublin in 1894, which was not only a memorable local entertainment event but also one of a series of major local annual events. "Araby" also evokes the distinctive version of Irish Orientalism that looked to the East for the highest sources of nation al identity and the very origins of the Irish language, alphabet, and people. Writing both within and against the moment of the Celtic revival, Joyce defined his place within the tradition of Irish Orientalism by writing two biographical essays on the Irish poet and Orientalist James Clarence Mangan in 1902 and 1907, the composition of which closely bracketed and heavily shaped the writing of "Araby," as Joyce acknowledges by naming an essential character in the story after Mangan. The local Dublin reader, to whom Joyce large ly directed "Araby" when he wrote it in 1905, already knew a great deal about the several contexts of the story, the annual bazaars and fairs such as Araby, the long literary and even musical tradition of Irish Orientalism, and perhaps even something of the place of Mangan in the Celtic Revival. These external and social contexts of "Araby" come into dynamic opposition to the internal and private culture of the boy's narrative in the voice of the first person narrator, a more mature version of the young protagonist, who repeatedly warns the reader against the boy's characteristic confusion and follies. Joyce used a sense of exact historical referentiality in his early fic tion significantly to affect readers and critics, though he was fully aware that some might take his stories as "a caricature of Dublin life" (LettersII 99) or as a satire in his "nicely polished looking-glass" (LettersI 64); only a few months before writing "Araby," he hoped to extend his work into a second series to be called "Provincials"

Two Reactions to Susser's "EFL's Othering of Japan: Orientalism in English Language Teaching"

Abstract: Bernard Susser (1998) argues that EFL researchers are gUilty of Orientalism in their depiction of Japanese students. For the framework of his critique, Susser uses Said's concept of Orientalism, which outlines various ways in which Western researchers, in their attempt to explain the Orient, have instead, dominated and restructured it. Susser claims that much research on Japanese learners of English falls into the same genre and he identifies four characteristics of Orientalism to illustrate his point: essentializing, stereotyping, representing, and othering. Unfortunately, in chOOSing the Orientalist framework, Susser has given us a flawed paper. As an overreaction to legitimate concerns about ste­ reotyping and the overwhelmingly Western-biased perspective of schol­ arly research, Orientalism tends to condemn legitimate tools of inquiry because of the results they have produced.

Travellers in Egypt

Abstract: European travellers in Egypt - the representation of the host culture, Hussein M. Fahim. Part 1 Early travellers: Pietro Della Valle in Ottoman Egypt, 1615-1616, Peter M. Holt George Baldwin - soldier of fortune? Rosemarie Said Zahlan. Part 2 Egyptological travellers: a pioneer Egyptologist - Giovanni Baptista Belzoni,1778-1823, Peter A. Clayton William John Bankes' collection of drwoings of Egypt an Nubia, Patricia Usick Linant de Bellfonds - travels in Egypt, Sudan and Arabia Petraea, 1818-1828, Marcel Kurz, Pascale Linant de Bellefonds a Prussian expedition in 1820 - Heinrich von Minutoli, Joachim S. Karig the journeys of Lord Prudhoe and Major Orlando Felix in Egypt, Nubia and the Levant, 1826-1829, John Ruffle the forgotten Egyptologist - James Burton, Neil Cooke. Part 3 Women in Egypt: two brides - Baroness Menu von Minutoli and Mrs Colonel Elwood, Deborah Manley a honeymoon in Egypt and the Sudan - Charlotte Rowley, 1835-1836, Peter Rowley-Conwy et al. Part 4 Artists and photographers: the unknown Nestor L'Hote, Diane Sarofim Harle between two lost worlds -Frederick Catherwood, Jason Thompson, Angela T. Thompson a naval tourist, 1834-1840 - Captain Henry Byam Martin, Sarah Searight two interpretations of Islamic domestic interiors in Cairo - J.F. Lewism Frank Dillon, Briony Llewellyn travellers, colonisers and conservationists, Hossam M. Mahdy a 19th century photographer -Francis Frith, Caroline Williams, Part 5 Literary interactions -Egyptian influence on European literature: Alexandre Dumas in Egypt -mystification or truth? Marianna Taymanova Faluber's Egypt - crucible and crux for textual identity, Mary Orr Egypt imagined, Egypt visited - Theophile Gautier, Peter Whyte Juliusz Slowacki in Egypt 1836-37, Jan Weryho French women travellers - a discourse marginal to orientalism? John David Ragan. Part 6 E.W. Lane and scholarly perceptions: Edward Said and Edward William Lane, John Rodenbeck text from 19th century Egypt - the role of E.W. Lane, Geoffrey Roper. Part 7 European influences on Egypt: travellers' rendezvous and cultural institutions in Muhammad Ali's Egypt, Philip Sadgrove views of al-Azhar in the 19th century - Gabriel Charmes and Ali Pasha Mubarak, Michael J. Reiner Egyptian travellers in Europe, Paul Starkey.

The East, the West and the Rest: Central and Eastern Europe between Techno-Orientalism and the New Electronic Frontier

Abstract: The article seeks to explore Central Europe's role and location within the imaginary cartography of techno-colonialist discourses on electronic networks. Ideologists of the European Union and of 'Mitteleuropa' (not to mention Eastern Europe) did not yet fully succeed in establishing a genuinely European high-tech identity. 'Networked Europe', as a fantasmatic technological space, rather seems to be caught between what has been called Techno-Orientalism on the one hand and the American New Frontier myth on the other. The article tries to map out the European imaginary in its differential relation towards both the 'Oriental' and the American myth of electronic space.

Spiritual wealth and neo-orientalism

Abstract: Introduction: Neo-Orientalism Edward Said's notion of the complicity between colonialism and Orientalism is well known. In this study, I explore an avatar of Orientalism, namely, neo-Orientalism, which has emerged with sharp definition in the post-World War II era. Like Orientalism, neo-Orientalism continues to shape actual knowledge of the "Orient" into a collection of fragments about the "East" in order to tame it; once tamed, it is the "West's" to excavate for its "gems." In the present, we continue to mine the religions of the East for their spiritual wealth. As I will show in a study of academics, music, and ideas about sexuality and therapy in the 1990's, this is usually done within the Orientalist imagining of a resemblance between East and West, and of the East as the West's salvation, without concern for the religious significance of what is being mined.(1) Here, the focus of my study is not conversion. Instead, I am interested in the ways in which we appropriate aspects of other cultures and remove them from their religious contexts, all without converting. Moreover, in this study, my focus is not the intentions of those who participate in shaping neo-Orientalism; rather, I explore the processes and the history that lead to neo-Orientalism. What I hope to demonstrate is that there is a connection between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western projects in Asia for political, economic, and strategic gains, for the acquisition of academic knowledge, and for the contemporary American fascination with the "East" for personal edification. While former economic, political, and strategic programs were carried out in the colonial period, present projects of self-interest explored here are conducted in the "neocolonial" world. In short, and though the projects overlap, colonizers in the past appropriated the economic and political wealth of other people; now, people with private interests appropriate the Orient's spiritual fortunes and claim that it is a right. Further, I will argue that this type of appropriation is itself a strategy of domination. Orientalism: The Trope of Identity and the Trope of Hostility The point of origin for Said's argument is the eighteenth-century Western discourse of hostility toward the Arab-Islamic world. His study of Orientalism traces the development of an academic discipline that is a Western form of thought and an agency of power for wielding control over Arabs and Islam. While Said focused upon the Arabic world, others have broadened his critique to include scholarly enterprises associated with non-Arabic regions, including, for instance, India.(2) In other words, many scholars argue that the scope of Orientalism is not limited to the Middle East. The critique driving these studies, like Said's, focuses on an Orientalism that produced an essentializing difference between East and West, which, by its very nature, constructed a hostile "other" in need of taming. Jenny Sharp has pointed out that Said dilated on the rhetoric of difference or hostility in early Orientalist writings because his purpose was "to historicize stereotypes that preclude a Western identification with Arabs."(3) Said nevertheless has recognized that early Orientalists, such as Sir William Jones - who is credited as the father of modern philology - planted the seeds for establishing a resemblance between East and West in his study of Indian languages.(4) Yet, Jones's sympathy with the culture whose texts he sought to translate, namely India, produced an alterity within identity. Like many Orientalists of his day, Jones assumed India to be an ancient civilization in decay; thus, he warned that "it was found highly dangerous to employ natives as interpreters, upon whose fidelity they [other philologists] could not depend."(5) Still, for Jones, India ultimately was like his "West": in positing a common origin between Sanskrit and Europe's Greek and Latin, the Englishman identified with India. …