Showing papers on "Orientalism published in 2004"

Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism

Abstract: Introduction 1. In the beginning 2. Islam, the West and the rest 3. Orientalism and empire 4. The American century 5. Turmoil in the field 6. Said's Orientalism: a book and its aftermath 7. After Orientalism? Afterword.

Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem

Abstract: pp.297 Supported by grants from the AHRC, and Leverhulme Trust, this monograph (translated into Turkish, 2006) was the culmination of a longstanding body of work concerned with gender and Orientalism, and it has contributed new primary material and analytic frameworks for a number of related fields. While the figure of the oppressed, yet highly sexualised, female inmate of the Muslim harem has been understood as the pivot of western Orientalist fantasy (Yegenoglu 1998; Zonana 1993), little attention has been paid to the voices of self identified ‘Oriental’ women. Rethinking Orientalism remedies this by providing the first monograph on English-language books by Ottoman women from the turn of the twentieth century. Arguing that non-Western sources deserve critical attention of the same rigour as would be directed as canonical texts, my primary research on Ottoman women’s writing in English demonstrates that they were able to intervene in Orientalist culture with a self-conscious ability to manipulate cultural codes that is not usually attributed to the inferiorised, silenced woman of the harem stereotype. The project extended the range of primary material available to the developing field of middle-eastern women’s history (Frierson 2000; Baron 1994; Booth 2001) and changed the ways in which women’s sources are analysed by integrating theories of performative gender identity into the historicised critical examination of non-Western cultural texts. My research into publishers’ archives, literary reviews and author correspondence in Europe, Turkey and the USA meant that I could construct a materialist analysis of the conditions of production and reception of middlebrow Western harem literature. My analysis of how the Ottoman authors intervened in local debates about female and social emancipation challenges some of the orthodoxies that have emerged in postcolonial studies. The project has prompted international keynotes and plenary papers, including Vienna, Berlin, Kuwait, USA (Tulsa, MIT), Toronto, Helsinki, Trier, Limerick.

Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction. Teaching What Cannot Be Taught: An Optimistic Overview Ted Solis PART 1. SOUNDING THE OTHER: ACADEMIC WORLD MUSIC ENSEMBLES IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 1. Subject, Object, and the Ethnomusicology Ensemble: The Ethnomusicological "We" and "Them" Ricardo D. Trimillos 2. "A Bridge to Java": Four Decades Teaching Gamelan in America Hardja Susilo 3. Opportunity and Interaction: The Gamelan from Java to Wesleyan Sumarsam 4. "Where's 'One'?": Musical Encounters of the Ensemble Kind Gage Averill PART 2. SQUARE PEGS AND SPOKESFOLK: SERVING AND ADAPTING TO THE ACADEMY 5. A Square Peg in a Round Hole: Teaching Javanese Gamelan in the Ensemble Paradigm of the Academy Roger Vetter 6. "No, Not 'Bali Hai!": Challenges of Adaptation and Orientalism in Performing and Teaching Balinese Gamelan David Harnish 7. Cultural Interactions in an Asian Context: Chinese and Javanese Ensembles in Hong Kong J. Lawrence Witzleben PART 3. PATCHWORKERS, ACTORS, AND AMBASSADORS: REPRESENTING OURSELVES AND OTHERS 8. "Can't Help but Speak, Can't Help but Play": Dual Discourse in Arab Music Pedagogy Ali Jihad Racy 9. The African Ensemble in America: Contradictions and Possibilities David Locke 10. Klez Goes to College Hankus Netsky 11. Creating a Community, Negotiating Among Communities: Performing Middle Eastern Music for a Diverse Middle Eastern and American Public Scott Marcus PART 4. TAKE-OFF POINTS: CREATIVITY AND PEDAGOGICAL OBLIGATION 12. Bilateral Negotiations in Bimusicality: Insiders, Outsiders, and the "Real Version" in Middle Eastern Music Performance Anne K. Rasmussen 13. Community of Comfort: Negotiating a World of "Latin Marimba" Ted Solis 14. What's the "It" That We Learn to Perform?: Teaching BaAka Music and Dance Michelle Kisliuk and Kelly Gross 15. "When Can We Improvise?": The Place of Creativity in Academic World Music Performance David W. Hughes Afterword. Some Closing Thoughts from the First Voice: An Interview with Mantle Hood Ricardo D. Trimillos Works Cited List of Contributors Index

Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History

Abstract: Centuries before W. B. Years wove Indian, Japanese, and Irish forms together in his poetry and plays, Irish writers found kinships in Asian and West Asian cultures. This book maps the unacknowledged discourse of Irish Orientalism within Ireland's complex colonial heritage. Relying on cultural and postcolonial theory, Joseph Lennon examines Irish impressions of Asia and West Asia, understood together as the Orient in the West. British writers from Cambrensis to Spenser depicted Ireland as a remote border land inhabited by wild descendants of Asian Scythians - barbarians to the ancient Greeks. Contemporaneous Irish writers likewise borrowed classical traditions, imagining the Orient as an ancient homeland. Lennon traces Irish Orientalism through origin legends, philology, antiquarianism, historiography into Irish literature and culture, exploring the works of Keating, O'Flaherty, Swift, Vallancey, Sheridan, Moore, Croker, Owenson, Mangan, de Vere, and others. He focuses on a key moment of Irish Orientalism - the twentieth-century Celtic Revival - discussing the works of Gregory, Casement, and Joyce, but focusing on Theosophist writers W. B. Yeats, George Russell, James Stephens, and James Cousins.

"The Hand of a Chinese Master": Jose Garcia Villa and Modernist Orientalism

Abstract: On November 9, 1948, a reception was held at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City in honor of Edith and Osbert Sitwell. The distinguished literary guests included W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Tennessee Williams. A photograph of the evening shows Auden, perched on a ladder, towering above the scene; Moore sits directly below him, with Bishop to her left. To their right is a less familiar figure, no less at ease than the rest, but perhaps most striking for being the only non-white person in the group: Jose Garcia Villa (1908-1997), a forty-year-old Filipino poet whose 1942 collection Have Come, Am Here had earned him wide acclaim and admission to the highest American literary circles. That Villa's name should be largely unknown today would likely be quite surprising to the literary luminaries who surrounded him at that reception. Villa's prominent friends and champions--Moore, Edith Sitwell, E. E. Cummings, Mark Van Doren--considered Villa a significant writer, and his work was widely anthologized in collections of modern American poetry of the 1940s and 1950s. Although he had only published two volumes in the United States, his reputation was substantial enough for a Selected Poems to be issued in 1958. Yet by the 1960s Villa was already sliding into obscurity. His poems stopped appearing in major American poetry anthologies, and his books went out of print and remained so. Perhaps his baroque religious imagery came to seem dated and his formal innovations--"reversed consonance" and "comma poems"--derivative of poets like Cummings. In any case, Villa fell quickly from the canon of modern American poetry and now seems a mere footnote to its history. In examining Villa's rapid rise and fall, I argue that his American reputation emerged in a kind of contact zone between Filipino and US literary formations. Villa has been regarded since the 1930s as the Philippines' greatest modern English-language poet, the writer who, as E. San Juan, Jr. puts it in The Philippine Temptation, "almost singlehandedly founded modern writing in English in the Philippines" (171). Through much of the later twentieth century he wielded enormous authority in the Philippines as critic, anthologist, and arbiter of literary reputations, and his status as a great "National Artist" was even officially ratified by the Marcos regime in the early 1970s. But American modernism could only adapt to the phenomenon of a Filipino modernist writer by placing him squarely within the Anglo American literary tradition, while filtering his racial difference through an orientalism already present within modernist ideology. The presence of that orientalism also meant that there was a particular space available for Villa to occupy. In this sense, race became a curious kind of asset in his US canonization. But it also, as his fall from favor suggests, placed a limit on the kinds of formal gestures that would be accepted in his work. Modernist orientalism allowed readers to aestheticize Villa's race in a way that did not disrupt the ostensibly universalizing standards of modernism; those readers that did thematize Villa's nationality tended to reject his work, revealing the deep connection of aesthetic criteria to national boundaries. Although Villa was hailed as a major new American poet when Have Come, Am Here was published by Viking in 1942, his career had already spanned over a decade in the US and the Philippines. Villa was born in Manila in 1908, the son of a doctor. His first collection of poems, swaggeringly titled Man Songs and published in the Philippines Herald, got him expelled from the University of the Philippines for its erotic content, but it also won him a literary prize whose funds allowed him to travel to the United States (Joaquin 160). He studied at the University of New Mexico and published a well-received short story collection, Footnote to Youth, in 1933. While he remained obscure in the US, Villa's reputation in the Philippines soared through the 1930s. …

Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, and: Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (review)

Abstract: and, according to Handley, ‘‘only betokens trouble’’ (18). Handley reads ‘‘the troubled particulars of romance and marriage in relation to American nationalism’’ (24), concluding that the conflicted marriages ‘‘in the literary West so often separate, even as they participate in, the double helix between love and nation, becoming allegories of a failed national metaphor of unity in a region, where many Americans hoped to locate common identity’’ (34). In Marriage, Violence, and the Nation, Handley challenges the myth of the ‘‘cowboy’’ West, but rather than offering an alternative paradigm, he explicitly and implicitly explores the complex act of creating literary meaning and its relationship to historical reality. In Handley’s view, and I agree, popular westerns, even formula westerns, are ‘‘ideologically complicated’’ and richly reward imaginative analysis rather than reductive dismissals (225). ‘‘What literature has to offer anyone who reads it closely,’’ Handley asserts, ‘‘is the demanding, unavoidable ambiguity and estranging effect of literary expression itself’’ (230), and he demonstrates this point in detailed and inventive readings of important and still widely read texts. Most valuable is the way he brings these readings to bear on a larger question of the relationship between literature and history, ‘‘this dilemma between the claims of representation and the claims of ‘reality’ ’’ (230). In a polemical afterword exploring ‘‘the impasses between [western] historians and literary critics,’’ (227), Handley advocates a ‘‘return to literary complexity’’ (233). These two fine books convincingly prove Handley’s point that ‘‘reality is narratively malleable’’ and support his argument ‘‘for understanding how and why narrative continues to matter’’ (232).

Post‐Zionist orientalism? Orientalist discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian‐speaking intelligentsia in Israel

Abstract: This article attempts to shed light on a special kind of Orientalist discourse that circulates in Russian‐Israeli literature and press. This discourse feeds on the cultural sources buried in the Russian‐Soviet imperialist discourse about ‘Russia’s Orient', which has been articulated by modern Russian literature, including prominent Russian‐Jewish authors, and corresponds to the racially grounded discursive practices currently widespread in post‐Soviet Russia with regard to natives of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The article investigates the ways of transferring Orientalist concepts from the (post‐)Soviet cultural experience to the Israeli one, identifying the Orientalist discourse's dual role in shaping the immigrants' self‐awareness on two levels, the local and the global. On the local level, the Russian‐Israeli intelligentsia deploys ‘Soviet‐made’ Orientalist interpretative tools to read and decipher the reality of a new country, by presenting it as a familiar reality. Identifying and labeling the loc...

Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800

Abstract: It is often said that all history writing is political. This book, the first major study of Irish antiquarian and historical writing during the turbulent second half of the eighteenth century, demonstrates the truth of this maxim. It charts the ways in which contemporary politics, notably the Catholic question, legislative independence and the gathering agrarian and political crises from the late 1780s, shaped articulations of the remote and recent past. Historical and antiquarian disputes mirrored political debate, so that Catholic and liberal Protestant interpretations of the past were pitted against conservative Protestant reiterations of earlier colonialist analyses. This study sets Irish writing in a broad European focus, examining the influence of key cultural developments, such as orientalism, primitivism and the vogue for Ossian. The intention is to show the complex ways in which Irish cultural politics in this period was open to, and interacted with, British imperial and wider European Enlightenment trends. Throughout the book, Scotland forms a particular point of comparison, since antiquaries there drew on the same Gaelic heritage in much of their work.Leaman criticizes the influence of Sufism on Islamic aesthetics and contends that it is generally misleading regarding both the nature of Islam and artistic expression. He discusses issues arising in painting, calligraphy, architecture, gardens, literature, films, and music and pays close attention to the teachings of the Qur'an. In particular he asks what it would mean for the Qur'an to be a miraculous literary creation, and he analyzes two passages in the Qur'an-those of Yusuf and Zulaykha (Joseph and Zuleika) and King Sullayman (Solomon) and the Queen of Sheba. His arguments draw on examples from history, art, philosophy, theology, and the artefacts of the Islamic world, and raise a large number of difficulties in the accepted paradigms for analyzing Islamic art.

Incredible geographies? Orientalism and Genre Fantasy

Abstract: Despite its immense popularity, the Fantasy genre has been largely ignored by academic geography. In this paper I give an overview of the genre, its politics and its geographies. I examine the ways in which several popular Fantasy texts negotiate and draw upon ‘Orientalist’ tropes. Fantasylands are often described as landscapes enabling characters and readers to flee the drudgery of the ‘real’ world and escape into inconceivable places populated by magic and wonder, realms liberated from the ‘actualities’ of everyday life. However, it is my contention, based on a reading of several popular Fantasy texts, that Fantasy cannot be viewed as a privileged genre where ‘you’re limited only by your own imagination'. Fantasy is not about inventing Other‐worlds: it is not a transcendental and surpassing genre. Rather, Fantasy texts, like all texts, are socially embedded. I argue that the construction of the ‘Western’ characters as the ‘good guys’ in Genre Fantasy texts can become problematic when these characters en...

Writing from the shadowlands: how cross-cultural literature negotiates the legacy of Edward Said

Abstract: This thesis examines the impact of Edward Said's influential work Orientalism and its legacy in respect of contemporary reading and writing across cultures. It also questions the legitimacy of Said's retrospective stereotyping of early examples of cross-cultural representation in literature as uncompromisingly 'orientalist'. It is well known that the release of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 was responsible for the rise of a range of cultural and critical theories from multiculturalism to postcolonialism. It was a study that not only polarized critics and forced scholars to re-examine orientalist archives, but persuaded creative writers to re-think their ethnographic positions when it came to the literary representations of cultures other than their own. Without detracting from the enormous impact of Said, this thesis isolates gaps and silences in Said that need correcting. Furthermore, there is an element of intransigence, an uncompromising refusal to fine-tune what is essentially a binary discourse of the West and its other in Said's work, that encourages the continued interrogation of power relations but which, because of its very boldness, paradoxically disallows the extent to which the conflict of cultures indeed produced new, hybrid social and cultural formations. In an attempt to challenge the severity of Said's claim that 'every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric', the thesis examines a number of different discursive contexts in which such a presumption is challenged. Thus while the second chapter discusses the 'traditional' profession-based orientalism of nineteenth-century E. G. Browne, the third considers the anti-imperialism of colonial administrator Leonard Woolf. The fourth chapter provides a reflection on the difficulties of diasporic 'orientalism' through the works of Michael Ondaatje while chapter five demonstrates the effects of the dialogism used by Amitav Ghosh as a defence against 'orientalism'. The thesis concludes with an examination of contemporary writing by Andrea Levy that appositely illustrates the legacy of Said's influence. While the restrictive parameters of Said's work make it difficult to mount a thorough-going critique of Said, this thesis shows that, indeed, it is within the restraints of these parameters and in the very discourse that Said employs that he traps himself. This study claims that even Said is susceptible to 'orientalist' criticism in that he is as much an 'orientalist' as those at whom he directs his polemic.

Back to Napoleon? Thoughts on the Beginning of the Modern Era in the Middle East

Abstract: This article resurrects an old and well-known problem of periodization: locating the beginning of the modern period in the Middle East. In the past quarter of a century or so it has been the focus of a debate that, though seldom articulated or presented as such, stands at the core of studies of the modern era. Two basic approaches have been offered. One, often described as Orientalist, has suggested that the modern period in the Arab Middle East was ushered in by Napoleon's invasion in 1798. Those who adopt this approach find a clear correlation between the invasion, emblematic of ‘the impact of the West’, and the beginnings of modernization and progress in a stagnant Middle East. The other, revisionist stance raises serious doubts about this correlation and suggests other timetables according to which modernity had its roots in the region itself or in continued interaction with the West before the arrival of the French revolutionary army. The article suggests a third option which takes into account new a...

Medical intellectuals: resisting medical orientalism.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose analogies between medical discourse and Edward Said's “Orientalism.” Medical discourse, like Orientalism, tends to favor institutional interests and can be similarly dehumanizing in its reductionism, textual representations, and construction of its subjects. To resist Orientalism, Said recommends that critics—“intellectuals”—adopt the perspective of exile. We apply Said's paradigm of intellectual-as-exile to better understand the work of key physician-authors who cross personal and professional boundaries, who engage with patients in mutually therapeutic relationships, and who take on the public responsibility of representation and advocacy. We call these physician-authors “medical intellectuals” and encourage others to follow in their path.

Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction

Abstract: It is often argued that a very special sort of consciousness went into creating Islamic art, that Islamic art is very different from other forms of art, that Muslims are not allowed to portray human beings in their art, and that calligraphy is the supreme Islamic art form. Oliver Leaman challenges all of these ideas, and argues that they are misguided. Instead, he suggests that the criteria we should apply to Islamic art are identical to the criteria applicable to art in general, and that the attempt to put Islamic art into a special category is a result of orientalism. Leaman criticizes the influence of Sufism on Islamic aesthetics and contends that it is generally misleading regarding both the nature of Islam and artistic expression. He discusses issues arising in painting, calligraphy, architecture, gardens, literature, films, and music and pays close attention to the teachings of the Qur'an. In particular he asks what it would mean for the Qur'an to be a miraculous literary creation, and he analyzes two passages in the Qur'an-those of Yusuf and Zulaykha (Joseph and Zuleika) and King Sullayman (Solomon) and the Queen of Sheba. His arguments draw on examples from history, art, philosophy, theology, and the artefacts of the Islamic world, and raise a large number of difficulties in the accepted paradigms for analyzing Islamic art.

Edward said and anthropology

Abstract: Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, it has been virtually impossible to study the colonial world without explicit or implicit reference to Edward Said9s charge that the sources, basic categories, and assumptions of anthropologists, historians of the colonial world, and area studies experts (among others) have been shaped by colonial rule. This article charts Said9s influence on anthropology, tracing both anthropology9s engagement with colonialism and the frequently ambivalent (and sometimes defensive) responses within the field to Said9s critique. The article also considers the larger terrain of Said9s engagement with the field, from his concern about its ““literary”” turn of the 1980s to his call for U.S. anthropology explicitly to confront the imperial conditions not only of its epistemological inheritance but also of its present position. Though Said9s direct writings on the discipline have been limited, the article concludes that anthropology has not only learned a great deal from Said9s critique, but has become one of the most important sites for the productive elaboration and exploration of his ideas.

Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia

Abstract: Drawing on Buddhist thought and offering, in part, a response to Edward Said's classic work in the same field, Translating Orients re-interprets Orientalism and shows the vital presence of the Orient in twentieth century and contemporary world literatures. Defining Orients as neither subjects nor objects but realities that emerge through translational acts, Timothy Weiss argues that all interpretation can be viewed as translations that contain utopian as well as ideological aspects. The translational approach to literary and cultural interpretations adds depth to Weiss's analysis of works by Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Bowles, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Kazua Ishiguro, among others. Weiss examines texts that reference Asian, North African, or Middle Eastern societies and their imaginaries, and, equally important, engage questions of individual and communal identity that issue from transformative encounters. Interpretation is thus viewed as an act that orients, mapping the world not in the sense of delineating a pre-given form, location, or order, but rather as a charting of its emergence and possibilities. In addressing the principal challenges of contemporary critical thinking, fundamentalism, and groundlessness, Weiss puts forward new concepts of identity and citizenship in the reinterpretation of Orientalism.

"Speak American"! or language, power and education in Dearborn, Michigan: a case study of Arabic heritage learners and their community

Abstract: This study examines the history and development of the “Arabic as a foreign language” (AFL) programme in Dearborn Public Schools (in Michigan, the United States) in its socio-cultural and political context. More specifically, this study examines the significance of Arabic to the Arab immigrant and ethnic community in Dearborn in particular, but with reference to meanings generated and associated to Arabic by non- Arabs in the same locale. Although this study addresses questions similar to research conducted on Arab Americans in light of anthropological and sociological theoretical constructs, it is, however, unique in examining education and Arabic pedagogy in Dearborn from an Arab American studies and an educational multi-cultural perspective, predicated on/and drawing from Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, Paulo Freire’s ideas about education, and Henry Giroux’s concern with critical pedagogy. In the American mindscape, the "East" has been the theatre of the exotic, the setting of the Other from colonial times to the present. The Arab and Muslim East have been constructed to represent an opposite of American culture, values and life. Through the agency of conflation, Arab (and Muslim) Americans are accordingly lumped together with people from abroad, making for their status as permanent outsiders. Thus, if the American Self represents an ideal, the inhabitants of this oppositional world of Arabs and Islam (an Anti-world) represent an Anti-self. A source of fear and object of hate and prejudice, this Anti-self is the object of derision and anything connected with it (e.g. language, customs, religion, etc.) becomes suspect and is devalued by association. This document has two objectives: First, to present an historical account of this context, and, secondly, to shed light on how and why things that are associated with Arab Americans in Dearborn are devalued. This is achieved by addressing the developments of meanings (of actions and symbols) in their American context, and how they have shaped (and still shape) the local culture's depiction of and understanding of Arab (and Muslim) Americans. Therefore, Arab American issues of language, culture and societal interactions should be understood as constituting a stream of American life, which represent a dimension of the total American experience, past and present, that is best understood through the paradigm of American studies. Viewing this experience as a cultural whole rather than as a series of unrelated fragments (e.g. immigration waves and settlement patterns, religious and state affiliations, assimilation and preservation debates), Arab American culture and issues begin to shine through as an organic and holistic experience whose characteristics are shared with other groups, suggesting research on this community is equally generalisable to others. ii As an academic work, this document promotes an understanding of the Arab American experience from an interdisciplinary point of view through focusing on the phenomenon of language in the community with emphasis…

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...

Colonialism and Gender in the East: Representations of the Harem in the Writings of Women Travellers

Abstract: Edward Said's analysis of the Orientalist discourse constructs a position of enunciation more questionable when the Western observer is female. Women were generally recipients of, rather than active participants in, colonialist projects. They accessed the Orient from a differently gendered perspective. Following Reina Lewis and Billie Melman, who suggest how female writers contested or subverted Orientalist discourse, this paper seeks to show that European women's texts, though shaped by race and class, could offer a counter-hegemonic viewpoint. Their writings about the Middle East and the harem challenge the dominant textual codes. Their empathy and receptivity co-exist with Eurocentricity. ********** Edward Said's well-known discussion of Orientalist discourse centres on the idea of the Other, 'a collective notion identifying "us" Europeans as against all "those" non-Europeans [...] the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European people and cultures'. (1) The traveller/observer accesses the alien or unfamiliar through various strategies contingent upon an imperialist position of Western supremacy, defining the foreign in terms of opposition (which often means negation or abstraction). Said's theories are dependent on two assumptions: first, that the sense of self against which the Other is positioned embodies the age's cultural hegemony, thus representing the dominant voice; and second, that the 'self' exists as a trope of positive function and value against which an alternative 'not-self' can be measured. As many feminist critics have pointed out, however, these theories construct the position of enunciation in colonialist or Orientalist discourse as essentially male, based on an East/West oppositional relationship as one of 'power, of domination', governed by 'a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections' and expressing 'a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different [...] world' (Said, pp. 5, 8, 12). Furthermore, Said argues that the Orient itself has a principally feminine cultural resonance, signifying a sexuality which is both desired and feared in the Western (male) imagination; Flaubert's representation of his Egyptian courtesan, possessed and voiceless, becomes a model here. Said's Orientalism clearly becomes questionable when the Western observer is female. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European women were generally recipients of, rather than active participants in, colonialist projects and their accompanying ideologies. Moreover, while female travellers, as much as their male counterparts, may already have 'received' the East as a region of exoticism and promiscuous sexuality, through literary and pictorial representation as well as from ethnographic studies such as Edward Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), it was not available to them as a site of heterosexual desire. At the same time, their gendered sense of selfhood, conditioned by factors such as the position of Western women within marriage and the nature of European domestic life, impacted upon their responses to the foreign Other. Said himself has acknowledged this skewing within his thesis. In a later revisionary article, he admits that Orientalism is not a monolithic and autonomous praxis, but relates to a larger enterprise or critique that includes feminism and women's studies. He also raises the question of 'how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations, the positions and the strategies of power'. (2) This raises further questions. Do women, as much as men, render the Orient as Other? Are they empowered to speak with an alternative voice free from or subversive of the dominant (male) discourse? Or, to put it another way, are they more likely to establish a dialogic relation with the Other, in a way that erodes, instead of erecting, difference? …

Chinatown, Whose Chinatown? Defining America's Borders with Musical Orientalism

Abstract: The music of Tin Pan Alley has proven an extremely rich source for investigations of race, ethnicity, and identity in America, most clearly with respect to Jewish American identity-making and the cultural history of black/white racial relations. The existence of a large body of Asian-themed Tin Pan Alley songs suggests, however, that other important trajectories involving the construction of ethnic and racial identity have been overlooked. To illuminate the role of music in molding ideas of Asia and Asian America, this essay focuses on the song "Chinatown, My Chinatown" by lyricist William Jerome and composer Jean Schwartz, offering detailed accounts of its origin, its 1910 Broadway debut, its presentation as sheet music, and its extensive performance history. By caricaturing local Chinatowns as foreign, opium-infested districts within U.S. borders, the song exemplifies turn-of-the-century musical orientalism as it was directed toward a local immigrant community. Yet the popular standard continues to resonate today in performance, recordings, film, television, cartoons, advertising, and the latest entertainment products. To account for the song9s enduring cultural impact, this essay traces its history across diverse performance contexts over the last century.

Egypt in Greco-Roman History and Fiction *

Abstract: more than a "representation." In his 1971 survey of the subject, C. Froidefond characterized Greek views of Egypt as a "mirage," an imaginative vision that had as much to do with who the Greeks were as it had with who the Egyptians were.1 Edward Said's 1978 landmark work on orientalism traced how that Egyptian mirage developed and endured over the years in response to Europe's own evolving identity, and his book made a strong case for what has become a key idea in cultural studies: Power follows knowledge, and the seemingly objective and scientific study of other cultures is often an accessory to the crimes committed by empires in the name of civilization.2 The enormous-and often nasty-controversy that swirled around the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena, with its accusation of racism in the conduct of European historiography, particularly in the treatment of the relationship between Europe and Egypt, has dealt a devastating blow to the pose of objectivity in the conduct of scholarship.3 Despite this controversy, or perhaps because of it, the peculiar position of Egypt in the imaginations of the Greeks and Romans and its role in the classical world continue to be a subject of the greatest interest. I wish to contribute to this discussion by looking at the role Egypt plays in the so-called Greek romances, prose narratives of love and adventure that were composed during the Roman empire. I will begin by selectively sketching ideas about Egypt in Greek and Roman letters as a context for my remarks.4

Edward Said and American Studies

Abstract: Edward Said contributed to American Studies as a critical theorist who stressed comparative and interdisciplinary methods, as a cultural critic who challenged the U.S. as a traditional and neo-imperialist power, and as a public intellectual who represented the historical diversity of the Arab world in response to Orientalist caricatures. He wrote about such important U.S. artists and intellectuals as Herman Melville, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and R.P. Blackmur. He understood and challenged American exceptionalism, especially as it structured U.S. perspectives on other peoples and societies. Educated in the traditions of modernist cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, Said is often identified as the "founder" of postcolonial studies, especially by his most committed critics. In fact, many of the political aims and methodological assumptions of postcolonial studies differ from Said's theory and practice. Respecting Edward Said for his great accomplishments as a scholar, teacher, and public intellectual, we should also question the culture of intellectual celebrity and genius with which he is identified. In some respects, his reputation is a very American phenomenon we need to criticize if we are to achieve a more collaborative understanding of the United States in its global interactions and realize our responsibilities as cultural critics.

Is the ‘Orientalist’ past the future of Middle East studies?

Abstract: Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America Martin Kramer Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy: 2001, ISBN 0 944029 49 3 American Orientalism: The Un...

The intellectual life of edward said

Abstract: This essay examines Edward Said's philosophy of intellectual life and what an intellectual vocation entails. Said's major contribution, Orientalism , is discussed in light of his own concept of ““traveling theory”” and its impact on various disciplines, especially postcolonial studies. Said's views on Palestine and the Palestinians are also elaborated and contextualized in his own oeuvre. Finally, the essay discusses Said's interest in musical performance and attempts to read his work ““musically,”” showing how all his interests are part of a larger whole that constitutes his intellectual legacy.

Oriental Travel, Arabian Kinship and Ritual Sacrifice: William Robertson Smith and the Fundamental Institutions

Abstract: The report of a ten-day expedition to the Arabian Hijaz by William Robertson Smith forms the fulcrum of an inquiry into the work of this denominated orientalist. A biblical scholar, encyclopedist, cultural anthropologist, and student of comparative religion, whose writings profoundly influenced figures such as Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Bronislaw Malinowski, Smith's experiences in the Arabian peninsula were crucial in his efforts to understand the nature of early Semitic social life, particularly the role played by ritual sacrifice and kinship rules. In this paper I argue that Smith's tour must be read not as an exercise in the Occidental ‘othering’ of the Orient but as a project in self-understanding and as a set of investigations into the genealogy of the Christian West. As such it is used to engage with contemporary debates about orientalism.