Showing papers on "Orientalism published in 2009"

German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship

Abstract: 1. Orientalism and the longue duree 2. Orientalism in a Philhellenic age 3. The lonely orientalists 4. The second oriental renaissance 5. The furor orientalis 6. Towards an oriental Christianity 7. On Aryans and Semites 8. Orientalism and imperialism 9. The study of oriental arts 10. Relations with others: the Great War and after Epilogue Bibliography.

Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes

Abstract: Westerners have long fetishized the idea of "Oriental" warfare, hoping to either emulate the strategies of foreign armies or assimilate members of Eastern and "martial races," such as Sikhs or Gurkhas, into their ranks. Samurai warriors, obedient to an ancient code of chivalry and honor, and the Mongol hordes thundering across the steppe-these exotic visions have thrilled Western imaginations for centuries. Yet, at the same time, today's Eastern warriors, such as the Taliban and Hezbollah, are treated with skepticism, and their success is acknowledged only grudgingly in the West. These contradictory positions throw into question the romantic notion that race, culture, and tradition determines how armies fight. Military Orientalism argues against the idea that culture dictates the strategy of war. Culture is powerful, Patrick Porter asserts, but it encompasses an ambiguous repertoire of ideas rather than a clear code of action. To divide the world into Western, Asiatic, or Islamic ways of war is a misconception, one that profoundly impacts our approach to present and future conflicts, especially the "War on Terror." Porter also emphasizes the danger of fetishizing the exotic, which complicates a more accurate understanding of the enemy. Launching a rare investigation into the history of this trend as it has appeared in the work of Herodotus and numerous other fictional and nonfictional narratives, Porter strikes at the heart of the fear, envy, and wonder inspired by the Oriental warrior.

Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450

Abstract: Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the "Islamist" terrorist In Idols in the East, Suzanne Conklin Akbari explores the premodern background of some of the Orientalist types still pervasive in present-day depictions of Muslims-the irascible and irrational Arab, the religiously deviant Islamist-and about how these stereotypes developed over time Idols in the East contributes to the recent surge of interest in European encounters with Islam and the Orient in the premodern world Focusing on the medieval period, Akbari examines a broad range of texts including encyclopedias, maps, medical and astronomical treatises, chansons de geste, romances, and allegories to paint an unusually diverse portrait of medieval culture Among the texts she considers are The Book of John Mandeville, The Song of Roland, Parzival, and Dante's Divine Comedy From them she reveals how medieval writers and readers understood and explained the differences they saw between themselves and the Muslim other Looking forward, Akbari also comes to terms with how these medieval conceptions fit with modern discussions of Orientalism, thus providing an important theoretical link to postcolonial and postimperial scholarship on later periods Far reaching in its implications and balanced in its judgments, Idols in the East will be of great interest to not only scholars and students of the Middle Ages but also anyone interested in the roots of Orientalism and its tangled relationship to modern racism and anti-Semitism

Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals

Abstract: This article discusses the perpetration of Orientalism in the arena of contemporary South Asian literature in English: no longer an Orientalism propagated by Occidentals, but ironically enough, by Orientals, albeit by diasporic Orientals. This process, which is here termed as Re-Orientalism, dominates and, to a significant extent, distorts the representation of the Orient, seizing voice and platform, and once again consigning the Oriental within the Orient to a position of ‘The Other’. The article begins by analysing and establishing the dominant positionality of diasporic South Asian women writers relative to their non-diasporic counterparts in the genre, particularly within the last half decade. It then identifies three problems with the techniques employed by some diasporic authors which have exacerbated the detrimental effects of Re-Orientalism; the pre-occupation with producing writing which is recognisably within the South Asian genre, the problem of generalisation and totalisation, and the insidious nature of ‘truth claims’.

The Jewish-Arab City: Spatio-politics in a mixed community

Abstract: Introduction 1. Orientalism, Modernity and Urban Design in Mandatory Lydda 2. From al-Ludd to Lod 3. Architecture and the Struggle over Geography 4. Territorialization and the City's Geopolitics of Fear 5. Agents, Enemies, and the Privatization of Space 6. Walking, Inhabiting, Narrating. Conclusion

Orientalism in Louis XIV's France

Abstract: Introduction: Baroque Orientalism 1. Barthelemy d'Herbelot and the place of Oriental learning 2. 'Toutes les curiosites du monde': the geographic projects of Melchisedech Thevenot 3. The double eclipse: Francois Bernier's geography of knowledge 4. The making of d'Herbelot's Bibliotheque orientale 5. Printing Confucius in Paris Epilogue

American Orientalism and American Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of US Hegemony

Abstract: In this essay, we argue that critical International Relations (IR) scholars must consider American Orientalism in tandem with American Exceptionalism in order to better understand US identity, foreign policymaking, and hegemony. We claim that American Exceptionalism is a particular type of American Orientalism, a style of thought about the distinctions between the “West” and the “East” that gives grounding to the foundational narrative of “America.” While Exceptionalism and Orientalism both deploy similar discursive, ontological, and epistemological claims about the “West” and its non-western “Others,” Exceptionalism is also rooted specifically in American political thought that developed in contradistinction to Europe. As such, we demonstrate that different logics of othering are at work between the West and the non-West, and among Western powers. We implore critical IR scholars to interrogate how the United States and Europe alternatively collude and clash in wielding normative power over their non-Western Others. We claim such research is important for exploring the staying power of American hegemony and understanding the implications of European challenges to American foreign policy, particularly given recent concerns about a so-called transatlantic divide.

Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror

Abstract: This book is a sustained record of Hamid Dabashi's reflections over many years on the question of authority and the power to represent. Who gets to represent whom and by what authority? When initiated in the most powerful military machinery in human history, the United States of America, already deeply engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, such militant acts of representation speak voluminously of a far more deeply rooted claim to normative and moral agency, a phenomenon that will have to be unearthed and examined.In his groundbreaking book, "Orientalism", Edward Said traced the origin of this power of representation and the normative agency that it entails to the colonial hubris that carried a militant band of mercenary merchants, military officers, Christian missionaries, and European Orientalists around the globe, which enabled them to write and represent the people they thus sought to rule. The insights of Edward Said in "Orientalism" went a long way in explaining conditions of domination and representation from the classical colonial period in the 18th and 19th century to the time that he wrote his landmark study in the mid 1970's. Though many of his insights still remain valid, Said's observations need to be updated and mapped out to the events that led to the post-9/11 syndrome.Dabashi's book is not as much a critique of colonial representation as it is of the manners and modes of fighting back and resisting it. This is not to question the significance of Orientalism and its principal concern with the colonial acts of representation, but to provide a different angle on Said's entire oeuvre, an angle that argues for the primacy of the question of postcolonial agency. In Dabashi's tireless attempt to reach for a mode of knowledge production at once beyond the legitimate questions raised about the sovereign subject and yet politically poignant and powerful, postcolonial agency is central. Dabashi's contention is that the figure of an exilic intellectual is ultimately the paramount site for the cultivation of normative and moral agency with a sense of worldly presence. For Dabashi the figure of the exilic intellectual is paramount to produce counter-knowledge production in a time of terror.

Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India

Abstract: 1. European views of Islam and their correlation with Oriental despotism 2. Observant travelers 3. Political thinkers and the orient 4. The Oriental despotic university of Montesquieu 5. Edmund Burke and despotism in India 6. Alexis de Tocqueville and colonization 7. James Mill and John Stuart Mill: despotism in India 8. Karl Marx: the Asiatic mode of production and Oriental despotism 9. Max Weber: patrimonialism as a political type 10. Conclusion.

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625

Abstract: Preface 1. The search for India: the empire of Vijayanagara through European eyes 2. Marco Polo's India and the Latin Christian tradition 3. Establishing lay science: the merchant and the humanist 4. The Portuguese and Vijayanagara: politics, religion and classification 5. The practice of ethnography: Indian customs and castes 6. The social and political order: Vijayanagara decoded 7. The historical dimension: from native traditions to European orientalism 8. The missionary discovery of South Indian religion: opening the doors of idolatry 9. From humanism to scepticism: the independent traveller in the seventeenth century 10. Conclusion: before orientalism Appendix Bibliography.

Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies

Abstract: Series Editors' Preface Acknowledgments Timeline Exploring the Terrain: Introduction: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Imperialism Slavery and Empire in Romantic and Early Victorian Literature The Empire Cleans Up Its Act Emigration Narratives Thrilling Adventures Race and Character Imperial Gothic Debates: Imperial Historiography, Marxism, and Postcolonialism Gender, Sexuality, and Race Orientalism(s) 'Mimicry' versus 'Going Native' Can Subalterns Speak? Case Studies: Homecomings Tennyson, Yeats, and Celticism Oriental Desires and Imperial Boys: Romancing India Imperial Boys: Romancing Africa Coda Primary Sources Works Cited Secondary Sources Further Reading

"Applied Orientalism" in British India and Tsarist Turkestan

Abstract: Writing in 1872, Sir Alfred Lyall, Governor of the North-Western Provinces of British India, was talking about the reluctance amongst many of the old Muslim scholarly class of North India to embrace the modern, enlightened learning of the West. For Lyall, to be an “Orientalist” was to be one of those Anglo-Indian advocates of state support for “Oriental Learning”—the study of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit—in the tradition established by Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, who had been worsted by the “Anglicists” led by Lord Macaulay in 1835. To adopt the meaning popularized by Edward Said, we might say that while Lyall makes a classic “Orientalist” judgment about the value of Eastern civilization, he is also making an observation about the relationship between knowledge and power that still resonates today. Lyall is consciously echoing Macaulay's notorious statement, “A single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia,” which has often been taken as a byword for the arrogance of Europeans confronted with an Orient to which they felt themselves superior. The obvious point is that Macaulay had no interest in Oriental knowledge or knowledge of the Orient: he was not an Orientalist at all. Perhaps this is why Said dealt with him only tangentially.

The Soviet discourse on the origin and class character of Islam, 1923-1933

Abstract: The article examines the growing radicalization of the Marxist anti-Islamic discourse in the USSR as a case-study of "Soviet Orientalism". To which of Marx's five socio-economic formations should Muslim society be assigned? During the relatively pluralistic period of the New Economic Policy (1921-1927) Marxist scholars offered various answers. Many argued that Islam emerged from the trading community of Mecca and was trade-capitalist by nature (M. Reisner, E. Beliaev, L. Klimovich). Others held that Islam reflected the interests of the agriculturalists of Medina (M. Tomara), or of the Bedouin nomads (V. Ditiakin, S. Asfendiarov); and some even detected communist elements in Islam (Z. and D. Navshirvanov). All authors found support in the Qur'ān and works of Western Orientalists. By the late 1920s Marx' and Engels' scattered statements on Islam became central in the discourse, and in 1930 Liutsian Klimovich rejected the Qur'ān altogether by arguing that the book, as well as Muhammad himself, were mere inventions of later times. By the end of the Cultural Revolution (1929-1931) it was finally "established" that Islam was "feudal" in character, and critical studies of Islam became impossible for decades. The "feudal" interpretation legitimized the Soviet attack on Islam and Muslim societies at that time; but also many of the Marxist writers on Islam perished in Stalin's Terror. We suggest that the harsh polemics the authors directed against each other in the discourse contributed to their later repression. By lending itself to the interests of the totalitarian state, Soviet Marxist Islamology committed suicide—the ultimate form of "Orientalism".

Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India's Rebirth in Modern Germany

Abstract: Investigating the growth of Indology (the study of East Indian texts, literature, and culture) and the diffusion of this knowledge about ancient India within nineteenth-century Germany, this work contextualizes approaches to contact by historically grounding them in a contemporary history of German culture, education, and science It answers the historical anomaly of why Germany had more nineteenth-century experts in the academic discipline of Indology than all other European powers combined German interest in ancient India developed because it was useful for widely varying German projects, including Romanticism and nationalism German Indologists made successful arguments about the cultural and intellectual relevance of ancient India for modern Germany, leaving an ambiguous legacy including a deeper appreciation of South Asian culture as well as scholarly justifications for the warlike image of a Swastika-bearing Aryan 'master race' Douglas T McGetchin is Assistant Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University

Western Self, Asian Other: Modernity, Authenticity, and Nostalgia for "Tradition" in Buddhist Studies

Abstract: Introduction There has been considerable rancor and finger-pointing in recent years concerning the intersection of the West and Buddhism. A new wave of research has focused on Orientalism and the ways in which Western ideas about Buddhism, and even Western criticisms of Buddhism, have been appropriated and turned on their heads to produce a variety of hybrid traditions most often called Buddhist modernism and Protestant Buddhism. Western scholars and early adopters of Buddhism, as well as contemporary Western Buddhist sympathizers and converts, are regularly labeled Orientalists; (1) Asian Buddhists like Anagarika Dharmapala and D. T. Suzuki are routinely dismissed for appropriating Western ideas and cloaking them with the veil of tradition, sometimes for nationalistic ends, and producing "Buddhist modernism." With the not always friendly tone that has accompanied many of these indictments of Westernization and Orientalism, it is no wonder that many researchers have grown tired of the discussion. However, as taxing as it may be, it benefits our work to recognize the biases and theoretical missteps that may confuse our understandings and risk producing stereotyped caricatures of the people we study. While some may like to say that becoming "all worked up" over categories of representation is fruitless and instead suggest that we move on to the task of description, I would argue that for those of us who are on the receiving end of these categories, or have family and friends affected by the continued cultivation of Orientalism and related modes of Othering in Western scholarship and popular culture, we do not have the privilege to set aside the discussion for a later time. I would suggest that it is, in fact, our desire to avoid the painful recognition of our complicity in the matter coupled with the privilege of not having to confront such stereotypes in our personal, daily lives that drives us to set the issue aside as if it were mere quibbling. I have no such luxury, and I make no apologies for caring deeply about the sometimes demeaning, though usually well-intentioned, representations of Asian American and Western convert Buddhists in the Buddhist Studies literature that continues unabated. I would stress that there are times when an interrogation of theoretical concerns is necessary to producing more accurate and useful descriptive work. This is one of those times. This paper seeks to address some of the more rancorous strands of the discussion, noting that the fuel for claims of Orientalism and the related idea of a Westernized Buddhist modernism can more often than not be traced to a concern for the preservation of a "tradition" that scholars fear is being lost to the ravages of modernity. While I do not wish to contribute more hostility and finger-pointing to the field, I think it is important to recognize that these accusations have contributed to an attitude of dismissal toward a significant and growing population of Buddhists, who, though certainly worthy of study, appear to be marginal to the main project of Buddhist Studies, which is overtly concerned with a non-Western Other. The discourse concerning Buddhist modernism has carried with it a subtle claim that so-called "modern" Buddhists--who would not necessarily label themselves as such--are not "really" Buddhist at all; they are tainted by Western culture, philosophy, and religion, and as such are peripheral to the study of the "authentic" Buddhism that resides in a more "traditional" Asia. When mapped onto an essentialized Self/Other or West/East complex, Western Buddhists (of both the convert and so-called "ethnic" varieties), as well as Asian Buddhists of all stripes, are reduced to stereotypes of "traditional" and "modern" that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of their religious traditions, beliefs, and practices. It further produces "good savages" and "bad savages," condemning those who fail to live up to the standard of a non-Westernized "traditional Buddhism" that we have created as a mirror to the modern West. …

Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination: Thresholds of Belonging

Abstract: Since the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917, the state has engaged in vigorous campaign to forge a unified national identity. Within the context of this effort, Indians are at once both denigrated and romanticized. Often marginalized, they are nonetheless subjects of constant national interest. Contradictory policies highlighting segregation, assimilation, modernization, and cultural preservation have alternately included and excluded Mexico's indigenous population from the state's self-conscious efforts to shape its identity. Yet, until now, no single book has combined the various elements of this process to provide a comprehensive look at the Indian in Mexico's cultural imagination. Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination offers a much-needed examination of this fickle relationship as it is seen through literature, ethnography, film and art. The book focuses on representations of indigenous peoples in post-revolutionary literary and intellectual history by examining key cultural texts. Using these analyses as a foundation, Analisa Taylor links her critique to national Indian policy, rights, and recent social movements in Southern Mexico. In addition, she moves beyond her analysis of indigenous peoples in general to take a gendered look at indigenous women ranging from the villainized Malinche to the highly romanticized and sexualized Zapotec women of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The contradictory treatment of the Indian in Mexico's cultural imagination is not unique to that country alone. Rather, the situation there is representative of a phenomenon seen throughout the world. Though this book addresses indigeneity in Mexico specifically, it has far-reaching implications for the study of indigenaety across Latin America and beyond. Much like the late Edward Said's Orientalism, this book provides a glimpse at the very real effects of literary and intellectual discourse on those living in the margins of society. This book's interdisciplinary approach makes it an essential foundation for research in the fields of anthropology, history, literary critique, sociology, and cultural studies. While the book is ideal for a scholarly audience, the accessible writing and scope of the analysis make it of interest to lay audiences as well. It is a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the politics of indigeneity in Mexico and beyond.

Romantic cultural imperialism

Abstract: Scholars gradually recognize that most of the major writers of the Romantic period had at least a passing flirtation with the most prominent cultural component of imperialism, namely, Orientalism. Nature poetry, suggests that Orientalism helped to define political, social and cultural practices in areas far removed from the East itself. the most successful Orientalist tales or pictures in the Romantic period, of which Byron would later claim to provide the finest 'samples' depended upon a sometimes jarring discrepancy. The concept of the sovereign Western subject would prove essential to the work of the empire-builders of the nineteenth century. Wordsworth's struggle is therefore to rescue Poetry from being merely 'a matter of amusement and idle pleasure', as though a taste for Poetry were as indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry'. Orientalism, then, was hardly just a thematic 'sideshow' for Romantic poetry.

The legacy of Edward W. Said

Abstract: With the untimely death of Edward W. Said in 2003, various academic and public intellectuals worldwide have begun to reassess the writings of this powerful oppositional intellectual. Figures on the neoconservative right have already begun to discredit Said\u2019s work as that of a subversive intent on slandering America\u2019s benign global image and undermining its global authority. On the left, a significant number of oppositional intellectuals are eager to counter this neoconservative vilification, proffering a Said who, in marked opposition to the \u201canti-humanism\u201d of the great poststructuralist thinkers who were his contemporaries--Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault--reaffirms humanism and thus rejects poststructuralist theory. In this provocative assessment of Edward Said\u2019s lifework, William V. Spanos argues that Said\u2019s lifelong anti-imperialist project is actually a fulfillment of the revolutionary possibilities of poststructuralist theory. Spanos examines Said, his legacy, and the various texts he wrote--including Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism--that are now being considered for their lasting political impact.

Writing the History of the Modern Copts: From Victims and Symbols to Actors

Abstract: Scholars of Egyptian history and politics face a dearth of analytical studies of the modern Coptic Church and community. This state of affairs is due to various factors of a methodological, theoretical, and practical nature. In practical terms, both the Egyptian state and the Coptic Orthodox Church have discouraged exploration of Coptic identity given the political taboo of sectarianism. In theoretical terms, Edward Said's Orientalism led to concerns among scholars about overemphasizing faith in their analyses of Middle Eastern history and politics. In methodological terms, modern Coptic historiography remains hobbled by an ‘enlightenment paradigm’ which discounts the political potential and action of subaltern and clerical forces within the community. This article urges a concern with the ways in which these subaltern and clerical forces shaped the Coptic ‘discursive tradition’ in the course of the twentieth century, as a means by which to restore Copts to modern Egyptian historiography, not as victims or symbols, but as actors in their own right.

Islam, Education and Reform in Southern Thailand: Tradition and Transformation

Abstract: "This is a remarkable piece of scholarship that illuminates general and specific tendencies in Islamic education in South Thailand. Armed with an enormous amount of rich empirical detail and an elegant writing style, the author debunks the simplistic Orientalist conceptions of Wahhabi and Salafi influences on Islamic education in South Thailand. This work will be a state-of-the-art source for understanding the role of Islam and the ongoing conflict in this troubled region of Southeast Asia. The book is significant for those scholars who are attempting to understand Muslim communities in Southeast Asia, and also for those who want deep insights into Islamic education and its influence in any area of the Islamic world." - Raymond Scupin, Professor of Anthropology and International Studies Lindenwood University, USA "Few books address the sensitive issue of Islamic education with empathy as well as critical distance as Joseph C. Liow's Islam, Education, and Reform in Southern Thailand. He examines global networks of religious learning within a local Thai as well as regional Asian context by brilliantly revealing the intersections between religion, politics and modernity in an accessible and illuminating manner. Traditional educational institutions rarely receive such sensitive and balanced treatment. Liow's book is a tour de force and mandatory reading for policy-makers, academics and all of those interested in current affairs." - Ebrahim Moosa, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Department of Religion, Associate Director, Duke Islamic Studies Center (DISC), Duke University, USA "Islam, Education, and Reform in Southern Thailand is Joseph Chinyong Liow's critical attempt to map out the reflexive questioning, locations of authority, dynamics and contestations within the Muslim community over what constitutes Islamic knowledge and education. Through the optics of Islamic education in Southern Thailand, Liow manages to brilliantly portray the ways in which Muslim minority negotiate their lives in the local context of violence and the global context of crisis of modernity." - Chaiwat Satha-Anand, Senior Research Scholar, Thailand Research Fund, Author of The Life of this World: Negotiated Muslim Lives in Thai Society

Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary

Abstract: List of Illustrations ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xix Introduction: Art, Asian America, and the Social Imaginary: A Poetics of Positionality 1 1. A Play of Positionalities: Reconsidering Identification 17 2. Othering: Primitivism, Orientalism, and Stereotyping 57 3. Trauma, Social Memory, and Art 120 4. Migration, Mixing, and Place 194 Epilogue: Toward an Ongoing Dialogue 271 Notes 283 Bibliography 321 Index 353

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: The Formation of a Secret

Abstract: Edward Said suggested that Islamophobia was a "secret sharer" of anti-Semitism. (1) This was more than a passing nod to a subject outside of what he was writing about; on the contrary, long, detailed passages in Orientalism make it clear that the construction of the Semite was at the core of what Said was writing about. (2) That should hardly have surprised anyone who knows the history of how Jews and Muslims were imagined from the Middle Ages to the mid twentieth century: together, as two of an oriental kind. The real question is how it came about that Said could refer, correctly, to such an overwhelmingly obvious fact as having become a "secret." It was no such thing to the people who started using the term "anti-Semite" in the late nineteenth century. That was roughly a hundred years after the term "Semite" was first used by German biblical scholars as a label for a language family, whose best-known members were Hebrew and Arabic. (3) What I would like to do in this article is to ask what happens if we take anti-Semitism at its word, literally that is, as targeting all Semites and not only the Jews. I would like to explore anti-Semitism as one aspect of the long history of the joint construction of Jew and Muslim, and then ask how it is that in more recent times the commonality between Jew and Arab, which the term "anti-Semitism" displays unambiguously, could ever have become a "secret." I intend to stay with the very superficial, etymological issue of the "Semite" in "anti-Semitism." But I do so, of course, in the belief that this is an entry point that can take us much deeper. "Semitism" was a term that was invented to refer to a language type and a type of human being: a race and what we would now call a culture. It referred above all to the Jews and their biblical Hebrew-speaking ancestors, and to the Arabs. It was a development of an old tradition in the Christian West of regarding Jews and Muslims as distinguishable but yet closely related species of the same religious genre, a tradition going back to the very beginnings of Islam itself. (4) The major changes were two. First, the substitution of "Arab" for "Muslim" added a clear linguistic and "racial" dimension to the construction of Islam in the West. It was accompanied by a similar identification of the Jews, both biblical and contemporary, as carriers of a distinctive oriental, Hebrew culture and members of an equally distinctive, oriental Jewish race. Second, if the medieval habit was to imagine the Muslims as Judaizers and to compare them to the Jews, from the Renaissance on the tendency was on the increase to imagine the Jews on the pattern of what was becoming known of the Muslims. There was a common message coming from scholars like the orientalist explorer Carsten Niehbuhr, who in 1772 compared Arab Bedouin to the biblical patriarchs, from Ludwig Schlozer, who in 1781 first used the term "Semitic," from the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who in about 1821 declared that Judaism was part of "overall Arab religion," from the writer-politician Benjamin Disraeli, who in 1847 wrote that "God never spoke except to an Arab," including under that label the Jew, and, unforeseen by all of them, from the pamphleteer politician Wilhelm Marr who, according to tradition, invented the term "anti-Semite" in 1879, when he founded an organization called the "Anti-Semites League." (5) That message was, "look, the Jews are like the Arabs." To philo-Semites, including many Jews, this just made the Jews even more interesting in a period of romantic orientalism. (6) But to the enemies of the Jews it gave intellectual support for claiming that the Jews were, as they liked to say, an "Asiatic" element unassimilable to Christian Europe and western civilization ("Palestinian" in fact was used to describe in a derogatory way the Jews of Germany by the proto-Nazi orientalist and pamphleteer, Paul de Lagarde). (7) Orientalism was ambivalent: in some ways it feared or condemned the Orient and in others it loved and romanticized it. …

Reconceptualizing the postcolonial project

Abstract: This essay investigates the possibility of formulating a much needed new direction for postcolonial studies by focusing on a certain thread of argument in Edward Said's Orientalism, one that suggests that Orientalism is more an account of how the West experienced the Orient than it is a description about a place in the world, viz. the Orient. In this sense, ‘the Orient’ is both a place in the world and an entity that exists only in western experience. Orientalism is not only an experiential discourse but also a way of structuring this experience. The essay suggests that to dispute the truth status of this discourse and its descriptions is to stay within the framework of the colonial experience. Moreover, since Orientalism developed in continuous interaction with and as a part of the growth of social sciences, the latter cannot possibly offer an alternative to Orientalism. Both are expressions of the experience of one culture, the West. To understand the way western culture has described both itself and ot...

Genealogy of colonial discourse: Hindu traditions and the limits of European representation

Abstract: In the aftermath of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), European representations of Eastern cultures have returned to preoccupy the Western academy. Much of this work reiterates the point that nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship was a corpus of knowledge that was implicated in and reinforced colonial state formation in India. The pivotal role of native informants in the production of colonial discourse and its subsequent use in servicing the material adjuncts of the colonial state notwithstanding, there has been some recognition in South Asian scholarship of the moot point that the colonial constructs themselves built upon an existing, precolonial European discourse on India and its indigenous culture. However, there is as yet little scholarly consensus or indeed literature on the core issues of how and when these edifices came to be formed, or the intellectual and cultural axes they drew from. This genealogy of colonial discourse is the subject of this essay. Its principal concerns are the formalization of a conceptual unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called “Hinduism” today, and the larger reality of European culture and religion that shaped the contours of representation.

Jump back jack, mohammed's here

Abstract: This discourse analysis uses Said's concept of Orientalism to explore the ways in which Fox News uses the tools of news practice to create an ideological clearinghouse for a uniquely menacing image of Islam. As Said (1979) suggested, within this image, Islam is inseparable from what Muslims do, and Muslims are inseparable from each other. The modern image of an irrational, backward East that can never reconcile with the rational, progressive West echoes centuries of Orientalist conventional wisdom. The discourse Fox creates with its audience helps to set a foundation for polarized commentary and to legitimize support for a limitless war on the unknown.

Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture

Abstract: Political upheaval has marked Iran's history throughout the twentieth century. Wars, revolutions, coups and the impact of modernism have shaped Iran's historiography, as they have the country's history. Originally based on oral and written sources, which underpinned traditional genealogical and dynastic history, Iran's historiography was transformed in the early 20th century with the development of a 'new' school of presenting history. Here emphasis shifted from the anecdotal story-telling genre to social, political, economic, cultural and religious history-writing. A new understanding of the nation state and the importance of identity and foreign relations in defining Iran's place in the modern world all served to transform the perspective of Iranian historiography. Touraj Atabaki here brings together a range of rich contributions from international scholars who cover the leading themes of the historiography of 20th-century Iran, including constitutional reform and revolution, literature and architecture, identity, women and gender, nationalism, modernism, Orientalism, Marxism and Islamism.

German Orientalism: The Study of the Middle East and Islam from 1800 to 1945

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Working at the university 3. Writings and writers on the Middle East 4. The establishment of modern Oriental studies 5. The beginning of differentiation: Sanskrit and Semitic languages 6. The emergence of Assyriology 7. Islamic studies: The emergence of a (sub-)discipline? 8. The primacy of political factors: 1933-45 9. Conclusion

William Robertson, Early Orientalism and the Historical Disquisition on India of 1791

Abstract: In 1791, the celebrated Scottish historian, William Robertson, published his final work, An Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, in which he explored the commercial and cultural connections of India and the West from ancient times to the end of the fifteenth century. This article considers Robertson's Historical Disquisition within the contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment, the early British ‘orientalist’ movement, and the expansion of British dominion in India. It argues that while the work reflected the assumptions and approaches of the British orientalist school, Robertson – sensitive to criticisms that his previous History of America had been too dismissive of Amerindian cultures – went further than many orientalists in his positive portrayal of Indian culture and his opposition to an interventionist imperial policy. Indeed, the work was largely directed to preserving the ancient and sophisticated Indian civilisation from Western cultural imperialism. The ...