Showing papers on "Orientalism published in 2006"

The argumentative Indian : writings on Indian history, culture and identity

Abstract: From Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, "The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity" brings together an illuminating selection of writings on contemporary India. India is an immensely diverse country with many distinct pursuits, vastly different convictions, widely divergent customs and a veritable feast of viewpoints. Out of these conflicting views spring a rich tradition of skeptical argument and cultural achievement which is critically important, argues Amartya Sen, for the success of India's democracy, the defence of its secular politics, the removal of inequalities related to class, caste, gender and community, and the pursuit of sub-continental peace. "Profound and stimulating ...the product of a great mind at the peak of its power". (William Dalrymple, "Sunday Times"). "One of the most influential public thinkers of our times...This is a book that needed to have been written...It would be no surprise if it were to become as defining and as influential as work as Edward Said's Orientalism". (Soumya Bhattacharya, "Observer"). "The winner of the 1998 Nobel prize in economics is a star in India ...he deserves the recognition ...shows that the argumentative gene is not just a part of India's make-up that can easily be wished away". ("The Economist"). Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge 1998-2004. His most recent books are "The Idea of Justice", "Identity and Violence" and "Development as Freedom". His books have been translated into thirty languages.

The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother

Abstract: "Everyone has had one's own Orient, pertaining to space and time, most often of both" (Todorova 1997:12). Orientalism Revisited "Orientalism" as a critical category was instituted by Edward Said in 1978. For him orientalism is, first of all, a set of discursive practices through which the West structured the imagined East politically, socially, military, ideologically, scientifically and artistically. Orientalism is also "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and...'the Occident'" (Said 1978: 2) The Orient as such exists and real people live in the region concerned, but the European representation of these people is a typical cultural creation that enables those powerful to legitimize their domination over those subjugated and conquered. The oriental Other constitutes the alter ego of the West and a perpetuation of this dichotomy proves that a powerful cultural hegemony is still at work. Discursive hardening permits politically stronger groups to define weaker groups. Orientalism has been received both approvingly and critically. The most important critiques refer to the fact that "Said's work frequently relapses into the essentializing modes it attacks and is ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of western humanism" (Clifford 1988:271). Critique notwithstanding, the book inspired a sequel of works, some of them directly addressing Eastern Europe (Wolff 1994) and the Balkans (Todorova 1997; Bakii-Hayden 1995; Bakic-Hayden and Hayden 1992; Hayden 2000). Wolff wrote about the invention of Eastern Europe in the period of Enlightenment by Western intellectuals, travelers and writers in a style similar to Said's. Todorova is more specific. She focuses on the Balkans and asserts that in Western eyes this region appears, so to speak, as "neither fish, nor fowl," semi-oriental, not fully European, semi-developed, and semi-civilized. "Unlike orientalism, which is a discourse about imputed opposition, balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity" (Todorova 1997: 17). An ambiguity that raises anxiety. The Balkans emerge as the product of attempted Europeanization (westernization, democratization), a region that permanently has to shed "the last residue of imperial [i.e. Ottoman] legacy" (p. 13) by implementing rationalism, secularism, commercial activities and industry. The work in imagology, the term she borrows from Milan Kundera, despite being narrowed and redefined, also focuses on the way the West has created its "quasi-colony" which has to be dominated and subordinated both politically and intellectually. While discussing orientalism, Said, Wolff and Todorova touch upon several issues vital for today's anthropology that I will partly, although at times only indirectly, address later. All of these revolve around the issue of alterity and the epistemological validity of the concept of the Other. Thus, one can recognize that they are concerned with (1) the modes by which the Other is created. In anthropology, as well as in the works cited, the Other often assumes the status of (2) a universal cognitive category in the factory of social and individual identity that divides the universe into "us" and "them." However, it also figures as (3) an analytical concept that enables authors to construct narration and at the same time, somehow paradoxically, and in the most subtle approaches, to (4) deconstruct the category itself. In social life, the process of making the Other assumes various forms. Shifts in collective identities and the meaning of "the Other" have become a part of the transformations in Europe after 1989. There are several factors influencing these alterations, but one among them seems especially salient: a restructuring of the perception of social inequalities by the hegemonic liberal ideology. The degree to which various countries, authorities, social groups and individuals have embraced the free market and democracy-always evaluated by those powerful who set rules of the game-has become a yardstick for classifying different regions, countries and groups as fining more or less into the category of "us," i. …

Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class

Abstract: Preface and Acknowledgments ix Note on Translation and Transliteration xiii Abbreviations and Acronymns xv CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: Modernity, Class, and the Architectures of Community 1 CHAPTER TWO: An Eastern Mediterranean City on the Eve of Revolution 31 SECTION I: Being Modern in a Time of Revolution: The Revolution of 1908 and the Beginnings of Middle-Class Politics (1908-1918) 55 CHAPTER THREE: Ottoman Precedents (I): Journalism, Voluntary Association, and the "True Civilization" of the Middle Class 68 CHAPTER FOUR: Ottoman Precedents (II): The Technologies of the Public Sphere and the Multiple Deaths of the Ottoman Citizen 95 SECTION II: Being Modern in a Moment of Anxiety: The Middle Class Makes Sense of a "Postwar" World (1918-1924)--Historicism, Nationalism, and Violence 121 CHAPTER FIVE: Rescuing the Arab from History: Halab, Orientalist Imaginings, Wilsonianism, and Early Arabism 134 CHAPTER SIX: The Persistence of Empire at the Moment of Its Collapse: Ottoman-Islamic Identity and "New Men" Rebels 160 CHAPTER SEVEN: Remembering the Great War: Allegory, Civic Virtue, and Conservative Reaction 185 SECTION III: Being Modern in an Era of Colonialism: Middle-Class Modernity and the Culture of the French Mandate for Syria (1925-1946) 210 CHAPTER EIGHT: Deferring to the A "yan :The Middle Class and the Politics of Notables 222 CHAPTER NINE: Middle-Class Fascism and the Transformation of Civil Violence: Steel Shirts, White Badges, and the Last Qabaday 255 CHAPTER TEN: Not Quite Syrians: Aleppo's Communities of Collaboration 279 CHAPTER ELEVEN: Coda: The Incomplete Project of Middle-Class Modernity and the Paradox of Metropolitan Desire 299 Select Bibliography 309 Index 317

Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World

Abstract: Today the world's media have a pressing need to understand and interpret the modern Middle East. In this timely book, Lina Khatib examines how contemporary American cinema and the cinemas of the Arab world contribute to this global preoccupation in their representations of Middle Eastern politics. This examination of Hollywood as the dominant Western interpreter of the Arab World also views the Arab world in terms of how it perceives itself and others through its films. It covers films made in the USA, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine over the final two decades of the last century and into the present, showing how these cinemas represent major political issues in the Middle East, from the Arab-Israeli conflict, through the Gulf War, to Islamic fundamentalism. It also uncovers the challenges presented by Arab cinemas to Hollywood's ways of representing Middle East politics. The book goes beyond an analysis of difference, to address similarities in how political themes are selected as well as in the cinematic language that gives them life. For example, it looks at cinema as a tool of nationalism in the USA and the Arab world and at how the representations of political issues by Hollywood and Arab cinemas are informed by the political and historical contexts in which they occur. This book is inspired by Edward Said's writing on Orientalism, but it goes further, to show not only how the 'Orient' is constructed by the 'Occident', but also how the 'Orient' itself is consumed by power struggles both internal and external. "Filming The Modern Middle East" therefore establishes an important link between discourses of the West and those of the East.

Edward Said and the Cultural Politics of Education

Abstract: This introductory essay to this special issue of Discourse on Edward Said and the cultural politics of education provides an overview discussion of four inter-related themes representing the wideranging scope of Said's academic and political writings. The first of these themes relates to his idea of Orientalism, through which Said sought to describe the relationship between colonial knowledge and the exercise of imperial power. The second concerns the application of this theoretical work on Orientalism to his political interventions in the murky politics of Palestine, and the subjugation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. The third theme is linked to the critical role he envisaged for the intellectual. And the final theme relates to his commitment to the principles of humanism, democratic criticism and cosmopolitanism, which formed the core basis of his theoretical work and his politics.

Dancing Around Orientalism

Abstract: The performance of belly dancing in the West embodies a central paradox: while invoking Orientalist tropes in its appropriation of Middle Eastern dances, it is cast as a celebratory form of women's empowerment that destabilizes Western patriarchy. Exploring these contradictory claims, the author situates the predicaments of gender and interculturalism that surface in discourses about Western belly dance.

Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship

Abstract: This article examines how U.S. Orientalism and the anti-Chinese movement ambiguously facilitated the incorporation of African Americans into developmental narratives of Western modernity. This analysis focuses particularly on how the nineteenth century black press engaged discourses of Oriental difference in an attempt to negotiate the contradictions and vulnerabilities endemic to African American citizenship.

Nationalism and Otherness The representation of Islamic fundamentalism in Egyptian cinema

Abstract: This article focuses on the representation of Islamic fundamentalism in contemporary Egyptian films. It aims to go beyond orientalism-based studies consumed with analysing the West's representation of, and thus power over, the East. The article problematizes discourses examining fundamentalism's role as the West's Other and the source of its identity by analysing the complicated political role that fundamentalism plays in Egypt as an 'Islamic' democracy. Islamic fundamentalism is explored as an Other in Egyptian cinema that is used as a tool for strengthening Egyptian national identity. The article thus reveals the cultural tensions and power struggles present within Egypt as a nation caught between modernity and extremism. The article's highlighting of the processes of Otherness within the 'East' itself reveals the limitation of the idea of an East/West dichotomy.

Durable empire: state virtuosity and social accommodation in the ottoman mediterranean

Abstract: Subjects of the sultan: culture and daily life in the Ottoman empire. By Suraiya Faroqhi. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Pp. x+358. ISBN 1-86064-289-6. £35.00.The Ottoman empire and early modern Europe. By Daniel Goffman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+273. ISBN 0-5214-59087. £15.99.A shared world: Christians and Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. By Molly Greene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+228. ISBN 0-619-00898-1. 25.50.The Ottoman empire, 1700–1922. Second edition. By Donald Quataert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxii+212. ISBN 0-521-839106. £40.00.Since Edward Said first launched his devastating critique of western scholarship on the Islamic world, it has been almost impossible to think of Orientalism as anything other than a euphemism for the systematic distortion of an exotic Other. That imaginings of a fanciful ‘Orient’ are now recognized as providing acute expositions of western pathologies, of references to deep-seated desires and anxieties so disturbing that they only reveal themselves in alterities, goes some way towards explaining the sheer bulk of interdisciplinary publications that have been directly inspired by Said's Orientalism.1 As reflexive phenomena, however, such publications have even less to say about the real ‘Orient’. Rather, the historical reconstruction of Orientalism's ostensible subject has been left to a separate and less conspicuous stream of scholarship that is characterized by painstaking archival research.

British orientalism and representations of music in the long nineteenth century ideas of music, otherness, sexuality and gender in the popular arts

Abstract: This thesis explores issues of orientalism, otherness, gender and sexuality that arise in artistic British representations of non-European musicians during the long nineteenth century; it utilises recent theories of orientalism, and the subsidiary (particularly aesthetic and literary) theories both on which these theories were based and on which they have been influential The author uses this theoretical framework of orientalism as a form of othering to analyse primary source materials in the forms of opera libretti, popular fiction and the visual arts (alongside contextualising non-fictional materials), and ๒ conjunction with musicological, literary and art theories, and thus explores how ideas of the Other were transformed over time and between different genres and artists Section I The Musical Stage discusses elements of libretti of this period, and the occasionally contradictory ways in which the Other was represented through text and music; it particularly explores the depiction of 'Oriental' women and ideas of sexuality Through examination of this collection of libretti, the ways in which the writers of these texts filter and romanticise the changing intellectual ideas of this era is explored Section II Works of Fiction is a close study of the works of H Rider Haggard, using other examples of popular fiction by his contemporary writers as contextualising material; a primary concern of this section is to investigate how music is utilised in popular fiction to other non-Europeans and in the creation of orientalised gender constructions Section III Visual Culture is an analysis of images of music and the 'Orient' in "high art", illustrations and photography, investigating how the musical Other was visualised Through these analyses the author considers the means by which musical concepts were employed to create a wider Orient' on the pages, stages and walls of nineteenth-century Britain

On the Production of Expert Knowledge: Revisiting Edward Said's work on the intellectual

Abstract: Edward Said is deservedly well known for his literary insights on Orientalism. Yet, his work on the nature of the intellectual is equally important and particularly critical for navigating this moment of political, cultural, and economic retrenchment. In this essay I will explore the contours of Said's work on the intellectual. I argue that Said gave us a model of intellectual activity at a moment when we have to manage multiple professional and political obligations and responsibilities, all of which are ever-intensifying. I draw out particular implications for understanding the changing role of schools of education in the USA today.

Women, Words and War: Explaining 9/11 and Justifying U.S. Military Action in Afghanistan and Iraq

Abstract: Texts and images in the print media, outdoor advertisements, and on the Internet form the primary source material for this article. The Bush administration and the American media, drawing upon well-worn traditions of representation, contrasted American women and Muslim/Middle Eastern women, American and Middle Eastern male sexuality, and the moral qualities (good versus evil) of American and Middle Eastern people. They used those contrasts to explain 9/11 and legitimize war in Afghanistan and Iraq. 9/11 was simply explained through a contrast between American innocence and Muslim savagery. For Afghanistan, the predominant trope was liberating Afghan women from the Taliban, or white men rescuing brown women from brown men, a story at least as old as the British Raj. The Iraq representations were more complex; both pro-war and anti-war proponents used the same images of suffering Iraqi women and girls, but to different ends: Saddam Hussein was a demon who must be destroyed, or the suffering was caused by sanctions and Western military action. Saddam himself was conflated with Iraq, and images of deviant sexuality were employed. Throughout, American women and girls were portrayed as the right kind of woman: usually white and innocent, or heroic soldiers. In any case, they were free, not oppressed. Keywords: Orientalism, Women in the Middle East, Justifying War Introduction I am concerned in this article about the ways in which representations, primarily visual, of Middle Eastern and American women and men, generated by U.S. government spokespersons, celebrities, organizations, Internet sites, advertisements, newspapers, and newsmagazines served to interpret 9/11 and promote the agenda of war on Afghanistan and Iraq. The representations were not, of course, the only explanations of 9/11 or justifications for war, but they formed a substantial part of them. These representations have a long if not honorable history. The images of the lewd and lascivious Turk and the effeminate or homosexual Arab go back at least to the French Renaissance (Poirier 1996: 157-159). These were images of men, but Middle Eastern women haven't fared any better in Western literature. As Judy Mabro stated in the introduction to her anthology of European travelers' accounts, the veil was always an item of fascination, as was the harem. (3) The women were almost invariably depicted as exclusively sexual beings and, locked up in harems and deprived of male company, they had recourse to lesbian practices (Mabro 1991: 1-27). The same sorts of images could be found in the postcards made for French consumption in colonial Algeria (Alloula 1986). (4) Muslim women living in the United States protest that their "identity is reduced to a burka" (Al-Marayati and Issa 2002). The harem girl is alive and well in American media; for example, "I Dream of Jeannie" lives on in television re-runs and on web sites. (5) As "I Dream of Jeannie" suggests, stereotypic representations of Middle Eastern people are deeply embedded in American culture. For example, high school and Sunday school texts and curricula depict Middle Eastern people as violent, uncultured, backward, desert nomads whose religion teaches them that women are meant to be the slaves of men; indeed, the veiled woman is routinely depicted as a symbol of Islam (Al-Qazzaz 1975: 116-124; Abu-Laban 1975: 160-162; Suleiman 1977: 44-47). Popular American fiction is little different. Arab men are violent, sadistic and promiscuous sexually. The women are controlled by codes of honor, but also promiscuous like the men. And, of course they are oppressed (Sabbagh 1990). These types of images have been well documented. Jack Shaheen for example, has described the "threatening, shifty-eyed, hook-nosed, dirty, sulking Arab" in entertainment television (1980: 39). In The TV Arab he developed "The Instant TV Arab Kit:" "... a belly dancer's outfit, headdresses (which look like tablecloths pinched from a restaurant), veils, sunglasses, flowing gowns and robes, oil wells, limousines and/or camels" (1984: 5). …

Reading Nafisi in the West: Authenticity, Orientalism, and "Liberating" Iranian Women

Abstract: The recent proliferation of memoirs by Iranian and Iranian American women coincides with an increased U.S. focus on Iran as part of the Bush administration-dubbed "axis of evil" and the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have been justified by some as humanitarian acts of liberating those living under Islamic or authoritarian regimes.1 The most successful of such recent memoirs, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi, was released in the United States in late March 2003, the month of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It has been read by the U.S. and other Western press as a humanistic portrait of the intimate lives of Iranian women in the context of the daily oppression of the Islamic Republic. Nafisi's experience of teaching canonical Western literature in postrevolution Iran is understood to show how the "universal" values of these works allow Iranian women a space in which to experience moments of liberation, providing an alternative "liberation" narrative. The highly uncritical and positive reception of this memoir can be understood in terms of how the work reiterates, in a modified form, the Orientalist tradition. While Nafisi challenges a wholly monolithic understanding of contemporary Iran, she ultimately reframes the predominant Orientalist binary-of the "West" as modern, rational, and dynamic and opposed to an "East" that is static, irrational, and antimodern-into one of promodern Iranians versus antimodern Iranians. Nafisi's representation of women as victims of state violence in Iran becomes a key component of asserting this binary, opposing a monolithic and barbaric Iranian state to the democratic ethos that she argues is implicit in the (Western) novel and appreciated by her female students. Women's status as victims becomes opposed to religious men's complicity with or support of the state, and women invested in modernizing are opposed to these men, who are presented as seeking a return to a mythic Islam. Although Nafisi seeks to deterritorialize the desire and possibility of democracy and freedom, her association of such conceptions solely with Western cultural sources maintains the "flexible positional superiority" of the West, which is indicative of Orientalist thought (Said 1979). Furthermore, reviewers' readings of Nafisi construct her as providing an authentic and representative portrayal of Iranian women's desires and interests and thereby seeming to provide an objective authentication of the Orientalist framework. Among recent memoirs by Iranian women, Reading Lolita in Tehran has distinguished itself by its commercial success and critical acclaim. As of October 2005, the memoir had sold more than nine hundred thousand copies in the United States (NationalSales) and was approaching its second year on the New York Times best sellers list ("Paperback Best Sellers," 2005). Rights have been sold for a movie (Weaver 2004) and for its publication in twenty-two countries (Salamon 2004).2 Between its release and October 2004, at least fifty-eight reviews, interviews, and articles that discuss the book or its author were published in U.S. and other Englishlanguage Western newspapers, magazines, and trade publications.1 In this essay I analyze the processes of reception, reading, and rearticulation of the memoir through these articles and reviews. The memoir describes Nafisi's experience as a professor of Englishlanguage literature in Iran from the time of the 1979 revolution until 1997, when she and her family emigrated to the United States. From a prominent secular family, Nafisi left Iran at thirteen, studying in Europe and the United States, and returned to Iran as a professor following the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah. She currently teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she is also the director of the Dialogue Project, which seeks to "promote-in a primarily cultural context-the development of democracy and human rights in the Muslim world" ("Dialogue Project," 2005). …

Oriental Globalization: Past and Present

Abstract: The critique of Eurocentrism has gone through several rounds. The first round was primarily a critique of Orientalism. Edward Said and Martin Bernal, among others, focused on cultural bias and racism in Eurocentric history. Others addressed Eurocentric biases in development thinking (Samir Amin, Paul Bairoch, Stavrianos) and historiography (Eric Wolf, James Blaut, Jack Goody). In the second round, history from the viewpoint of the global South such as Subaltern Studies in India and revisionist history of Africa contributed different perspectives. In addition, global history generated critical historical studies that document the significance of in particular Asia and the Middle East in the making of the global economy and world society. Janet Abu-Lughod focused on the Middle East, Marshall Hodgson on the world of Islam, K. N. Chauduri on South Asia, Andre Gunder Frank on East and South Asia, Kenneth Pomeranz, Robert Temple and Bin Wong on China, Eric Jones on Japan, and Anthony Reid on Southeast Asia along with many other studies. This body of work not merely critiques but overturns conventional Eurocentric perspectives and implies a profound rethinking of world history that holds major implications for social science and development studies. These studies break the mold of Eurocentric globalization that dominates the globalization literature. Eurocentric globalization is geographically centered on the West and preoccupied with recent history: post-war (in most economics, political science, international relations and cultural studies), post-1800 (most sociology), or post-1500 (Marxist political economy and world system theory). 1 In

Imagining the other : orientalism and occidentalism in Tamil-European relations in South India

Abstract: Jouhki, Jukka Imagining the Other. Orientalism and Occidentalism in Tamil-European Relations in South India. Jyvaskyla: University of Jyvaskyla, 2005, 233 p. (Jyvaskyla Studies in Humanities ISSN 1459-4323; 47) ISBN 951-39-2527-7 Finnish summary Diss. The theoretical approach of this study concentrates on the images of the Other manifested in Orientalism and its counterpart Occidentalism. Orientalism as a discourse was first described by Edward Said who in his book Orientalism defined it as hegemonic Western popular and academic discourse of “the Orient.” Said analyzed the relationship between European colonialism and the intertwined discursive formations constructing the European experience of “the Orientals.” Occidentalism, respectively, is a more recent field of study of the discourse constructing Europe or “the West.” My study of Orientalism and Occidentalism is based on ethnographic fieldwork during which I collected material on the relationship between Europeans and Tamils in Auroville, a multinational intentional community and Kuilapalayam, a rural Tamil village in India. According to the material gathered, the Europeans of Auroville followed the traditional Orientalist discourse in desribing their Tamil neighbors. In accordance with Said’s findings, I found Europeans emphasizing certain key elements of “being Tamil,” namely the ancientness of Tamil people and the image of Tamil culture as a significantly confining entity. On the other hand, in the discourse images of Tamil intuition, spontaneity and freshness were applauded although they were seen viewed as in opposition with Western qualities like organizational capabilities. The Occidentalism of Tamil villagers, in which “the West” was interpreted mainly through observing the behavior of other Tamils living in Auroville, constructed an image of Europeans as a highly financially oriented group with little or no spiritual qualities. The cultural impact of Auroville was lamented but its economic impact was welcomed. On the whole the two discourses seemed to produce a simplified and exaggerated image of the Other. The traditional Orientalist binary ontology was visible in European discourse whereas in Tamil discourse perhaps the lack of Occidentalist tradition and thus the significantly limited archive in the Foucauldian sense was reflected in less binary views of Europeans and Tamils.

Euro-orientalism: Liberal Ideology And the Image of Russia in France, C.1740-1880

Abstract: Drawing from a range of critical perspectives, in particular postcolonial, this book examines the relationship between perceptions of Russia and of Eastern Europe and the making of a 'Western' identity. It explores the ways in which the perception of certain characteristics of Russia and Eastern Europe, whether real or attributed, was shaped by (and used for) the construction of a liberal narrative of the West, which eventually became dominant. The focus of this inquiry is French culture, from the beginning of the debate about Russia among the philosophes (c. 1740) to the consolidation of a professional field of Slavic studies (c. 1880). A wide range of writing - literature, travel accounts, histories, political tracts, scientific journals, and parliamentary debates - is examined through the work of major authors (from Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau to Tocqueville, de Maistre and Guizot, from Mme. de Stael, Hugo and Balzac to Dumas, Michelet and Comte), as well as that of many less well known figures. The book also explores possible continuities between those first academic accounts of Russia and Eastern Europe and present-day scholarship in Europe and the USA, to show that the liberal ideological accounts constructed in the nineteenth century still to a great extent inform contemporary academic studies.

Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community

Abstract: In ""Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim"", Timothy Gray draws upon previously unpublished journals and letters, as well as his own close readings of Gary Snyder's well-crafted poetry and prose to track the early career of a maverick intellectual whose writings powered the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. Exploring various aspects of cultural geography, Gray asserts that this west coast literary community seized upon the idea of a Pacific Rim regional structure, in part to recognize their Orientalist desires and in part to consolidate their opposition to America's cold war ideology, which tended to divide East from West. The geographical consciousness of Snyder's writing was particularly influential, Gray argues, because it gave San Francisco's Beat and hippie cultures a set of physical coordinates by which they could chart their utopian visions of peace and love. Gray's introduction tracks the increased use of ""Pacific Rim discourse"" by politicians and business leaders following World War II. Ensuing chapters analyze Snyder's countercultural invocation of this regional idea, concentrating on the poet's migratory or ""creaturely"" sensibility, his gift for literary translation, his physical embodiment of trans-Pacific ideals, his role as tribal spokesperson for Haight-Ashbury hippies, and his burgeoning interest in environmental issues. Throughout, Gray's citations of such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger shed light on Snyder's communal role, providing an amazingly intimate portrait of the west coast counterculture. An interdisciplinary project that utilizes models of ecology, sociology, and comparative religion to supplement traditional methods of literary biography, ""Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim"" offers a unique perspective on Snyder's life and work. This book will fascinate literary and Asian studies scholars, as well as the general reader interested in the Beat movement and multicultural influences on poetry.

Edward Said: Orientalism and Occidentalism

Abstract: Twenty-five years after the appearance of Orientalism, Edward Said’s ideas still have great importance, both in relations between the West and the Middle East, and in settings that Said did not address directly. This paper looks at orientalism between Asian states, between Asia and the West, and within China.

Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal'ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde

Abstract: 1. Orientalisms 2. A westernizing avant-garde 3. Art into life 4. Nationality on display: official versions, avant-garde interventions 5. Orientalism in reverse 6. Anti-artist: the year 1913-1914 7. Vsechestvo: Russia's other modernism.

No Race to the Swift: Negotiating Racial Identity in Past and Present Eastern Europe

Abstract: 1. MENTAL MAPS OF EUROPE: HISTORY AND TERMS OF TRADE Portrayals of Eastern European countries as "bridges" between East and West are commonplace both in the media and in the political discourse. In particular, the popular label "gateway to the East" is used in history textbooks, tourist guides, and economic reports to equally describe Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, and Istanbul (Hann 1995: 2). Thus, in the European imaginary, Easternness, in its European variant, is being continually passed on--and, as such, consistently refuted--all the way to Europe's geographical borders as they are defined today. As definitions of the border between Western and Eastern Europe have historically shifted to highlight ethnic, economic, imperial, or religious divides within the continent, so have attitudes toward the proximity of the Orient and the threat it was perceived to represent at different moments in time. Rather than a twenty-first century phenomenon, efforts to reject an Eastern identity constitute a historically recurring pattern in the construction of Eastern European national self-definitions that has been inextricably tied to (1) the military, economic and cultural impact of the Ottoman Empire in the region on the one hand and (2) the representations of Islam and the Orient in the geopolitical imaginary of the Euro-American core on the other. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the ongoing process of negotiating geographical borders while reasserting historical claims to territory and power resulted in further subdivisions such as Central, Northern, Southern and Southeastern Europe. Whereas Central Europe was conceived as a third zone between Eastern and Western Europe, but was coterminous with the nineteenth century geopolitical project of Mitteleuropa, Southeastern Europe was coined as a politically correct term for designating the Balkans, the easternmost region within the East itself (Gallagher 2001: 113). Due to its proximity to Asia and its legacy of Ottoman dominance, it was this last subcategory in particular which has conjured up the image of a bridge between Orient and Occident, and which as a result has periodically acquired the scent of temporal in-betweenness as well--of the semideveloped, semicolonial, semicivilized, semi-Oriental (Todorova 2002) always in the process of "catching up with the West." The resurgence of the stigma thus attached to the concept becomes increasingly clear today, when the same stereotypes attached to the alleged "Balkan identity" are being used in the political, social scientific, and media discourse of the very Europe the ex-Communist countries are trying to (re)join. The question of the historical origin of Europe's East-West divide is still under heavy dispute among social scientists, and--in view of its economic, political, and religious dimensions--probably evinces more than one answer. For the purposes of the present analysis, however, it can reasonably be argued that it was the Orientalist discourse of the 19th century--in the understanding Edward Said (1979) attributed to the term--that decisively shaped the content of the present categories of Western and Eastern Europe and made policies of demarcation from "the Orient" an important strategy of geopolitical and cultural identification with Europe for the latter region. As a discourse dominating Western representations of the Other and allowing Western European culture to gain "in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self" (Said 1979:3), Orientalism first emerged in the period following the Enlightenment. Scholarly, literary and scientific depictions of the Orient as backward, irrational, in need of civilization, and racially inferior produced during the next centuries served as background for representations of the Occident as progressive, rational, civilized, even biologically superior, thus justifying European colonization and control. …

Edward said's affiliations

Abstract: Postcolonial theory and criticism seizes on the fact of the uneven development of world capitalism as the central cultural theme for its reflections, divorcing it from the totality of social relations in history and the international process of class struggle. Edward Said inspired this “culturalist approach” with his deconstructive reading of Antonio Gramsci's critique of bourgeois hegemony. Said, however, tried to complicate the thesis of Orientalism with a critique of imperialist history, including US global interventions, in Culture and Imperialism and his later writings. Overall, Said, despite a resort to a militant species of liberal humanism, provides a critical perspective on the complicity of academic discourse with predatory neocolonial attacks on people of color everywhere, and on the value of popular-democratic ideals of democratic sovereignty and egalitarian community that can reconcile Europe and the Atlantic world with the revolutionary movements of “postcolonial” subalterns around ...

Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

Abstract: The first full length study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the seventeenth and eigtheenth centuries, this book explores the sophisticated correlation between identity and social space. The investigation is mainly driven by conceptual questions and thus seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the (gendered) social production of space. As Pohl's primary aim is to demonstrate how women writers explore the complex (gender) politics of space, specific attention is given to spaces that feature widely in contemporary utopian imagination: Arcadia, the palace, the convent, the harem and the country house. The early modern writers Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish seek to recreate Paradise in their versions of Eden and Jerusalem; the one yearns for Arcadia, the other for Solomon's Temple. Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell redefine the convent as an emancipatory space, dismissing its symbolic meaning as a confining and surveilled architecture. The utopia of the country house in the work of Delarivier Manley, Sarah Scott and Mary Hamilton will reveal how women writers resignify the traditional metonym of the country estate. The study will finish with an investigation of Oriental tales and travel writing by Ellis Cornelia Knight, Lady Mary Montagu, Elizabeth Craven and Lady Hester Stanhope who unveil the seraglio as a location for a Western, specifically masculine discourse on Orientalism, despotism and female sexuality and offers their own utopian judgment.

Romantic Representations of British India

Abstract: * General Introduction and [Meta]historical Background [re]presenting 1 'The Palanquins of State or, Broken Leaves in a Mughal Garden' * British-Indian Connections c. 1780 to c. 1830: The Empire of the Officials Peter Marshall * Torrents, Flames and the Education of Desire: Battling Hindu Superstition on the London Stage Daniel O'Quinn * Between Mimesis and Alterity: Art Gift and Diplomacy in Colonial India 150 Natasha Eaton * Poetic Flowers/Indian Bowers Tim Fulford *'Where ... success is certain'? Southey the literary East Indiaman' Lynda Pratt, * Radically Feminizing India: Phebe Gibbes's Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and Sydney Owenson's The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811) Michael J. Franklin * Imperial Strains: Shelley and Music Tilar Mazzeo *'Very acute and plausible': The Reception of Sir William Jones's 'On the Musical Modes of the Hindus' (1792) Bennett Zon *'Traveling the Other Way': The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810) and Romantic Orientalism Nigel Leask * Orientalism, Militarism and Romanticism: Writing and Rewriting the History of the British Conquest of India Douglas Peers * Orientalism and Religion in the Romantic Period: Rammohun Ray's Vedanta(s) Amit Ray

Danes, Orientalism and the Modern Middle East Perspectives from the Nordic Periphery

Abstract: In 1978, Edward W. Said (1935-2003), Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, published his now famous book, Orientalism. Intended as an indictment of the dichotomization of East and West – the willful categorization of the Orient as distinct and necessarily stunted in comparison to the Occident – Said argued that the perception, rooted in the murky centuries of medieval Europe, crystallized into a potent and pervasive discourse that once manufactured, combined establishment knowledge with political and economic power in the 19 century. Imperialism and direct occupation of the Middle East reinforced the belief in its regional subservience and weakness and forged a virtual ideology of Western superiority and entitlement. Yet how did societies and individuals at the margins of European and Western power fit into the framework put forth by Said? Was he correct to assert that the Orientalist discourse was all encompassing and colored every observer and scholar who studied the region? Or was it possible for individuals, both from within the states that dominated the Middle East and even more readily those native to the lesser powers that did not, to assert an independent basis for judgment and interpretation? This dissertation explores a range of experiences that Danes, citizens of a small and relatively weak European state, garnered in their encounters with the Middle East. Their views and understandings of events, as well as their perspectives on “the Other,” served to influence the shaping of knowledge in Denmark about the East. Further, as their country was unentangled in the web of strategic and imperial intrigue that dominated the affairs of the larger powers, Danes were able to position themselves before the local populations as individuals untainted by affiliations that might present a danger of undue influence. Ever conscious of this advantage, they worked diligently to cultivate that perception and harness it as an advantage wherever possible. In short, a revelation and consideration of Danish perspectives adds to the diversity of sources encompassed by the study of Orientalism.

Political and diplomatic developments

Abstract: Ottoman political history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is curiously under-researched. On the other hand, this sub-field of Ottoman studies was the first to receive systematic expert interest in Catholic and Protestant Europe. Moreover, Ottoman historiography also excelled in this domain. Paul Rycaut, Demetrius Cantemir, Mouradgea d’Ohsson and even the young Joseph von Hammer all treated the empire as a contemporary polity with a meaningful and functioning administrative structure. They tended to contextualise political and diplomatic affairs by reference to military matters, while military men such as Raimondo Montecuccoli or Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli discussed military problems while also showing an informed interest in politics and administration. Cantemir and Marsigli, who were of Ottoman extraction or else had spent a considerable amount of time in Istanbul, often shared a sentiment expressed by Ottoman chroniclers and political authors – namely, that the empire was in a state of decline. This idea, partly boosted by the influence of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1782–8), was to fascinate Western authors; unfortunately it was to prove detrimental to their understanding of and interest in the post-sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Only in the last few decades has the paradigm of ‘Ottoman decline’ been subjected to criticism. This debate has been informed by neo-Marxism, post-linguistic-turn social science, modernisation studies and, above all, the debate triggered by Edward W Said’s Orientalism (1978); however, Said himself had considerable difficulty when it came to dealing with the Ottomans.