Showing papers on "Orientalism published in 2011"

International relations and non-western thought : imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity

Abstract: Biographies: 1 Non-Western thought and International Relations Robbie Shilliam 2 The perilous but unavoidable intellectual terrain of the "non-West" Robbie Shilliam Part I : Colonial Conditions 3 On colonial modernity: Civilization versus nationhood in Cuba, c1840 Gerard Aching 4 Anti-Racism and Internationalism in the thought and practice of Cabral, Neto, Mondlane and Machel Branwen Gruffyd Jones 5 Voices from the "Jewish Colony": Sovereignty, Power, Secularization and the Outside Within Willi Goetschel Part II:Cultural Contexts 6 International Relations of Modernity in Sayyid Qutb's thoughts on Sovereignty: The Notion of Democratic Participation in the Islamic Canon Sayed Khatab 7 Decoding Political Islam: the International Historical Sociology of Ali Shariati's Political Thought Kamran Matin 8 Beyond Orientalism and "Reverse Orientalism": Through the Looking Glass of Japanese Humanism Ryoko Nakano 9 Culture in Contemporary IR theory: The Chinese Provocation Arif Dirlik Part III: Beyond the Nation-State 10 Alternative sources of cosmopolitanism: Nationalism, universalism and Creolite in Francophone Caribbean thought Martin Munro and Robbie Shilliam 11 The Internationalist Nationalist: Pursuing an Ethical Modernity with Jawaharlal Nehru Priya Chacko 12 Radical anti-colonial thought, anti-colonial Internationalism, and the politics of human solidarities Anthony Bogues Reflections: 13 Untimely Reflections Mustapha Pasha

The Concept of the Sinophone

Abstract: The spectacular rise of China as a superpower perhaps only now compels us to recalibrate existing discourses of empire and postcoloniality, but China has been an empire in the modern sense since the mid–eighteenth century, when it conquered vast lands north and west of “China proper.” This history has been largely hidden from view because of two unacknowledged obsessions: the fetishization of Western empires over other empires and the prevailing discourse of Chinese victimhood at the hands of Western empires. The rise of China would not have caught so many by surprise if our vision had not been persistently clouded by our privileging of the oceanic (i.e., Western) mode of colonial expansion, which paradoxically centered the West as the most deserving object of critical attention and intellectual labor. It also would not have been a surprise if we had looked back at the Manchu conquests of inner Asia, which present-day China largely inherited and consolidated in a continuous colonial project. Postcolonial theory as we know it, particularly its critiques of orientalism, may prove irrelevant or even complicit when we consider how the positions of Chinese intellectuals critical of Western imperialism and orientalism easily slip into an unreflective nationalism, whose flip side may be a new imperialism.

Gender, orientalism and representations of the ‘Other’ in the War on Terror

Abstract: After 9/11, images of the Middle Eastern or Muslim ‘Other’ have been highly visible in the Western world. Although published 30 years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism provides a useful critical lens through which to examine how these images function in War on Terror discourses. Feminist IR scholars have also highlighted the role gendered representations play in War on Terror discourse, and ‘orientalism’ as a tool of critical analysis must account for this. Using a concept of ‘gendered orientalism’ and applying it to three particularly prominent images from the War on Terror, I illustrate how gendered and orientalist logics in official and unofficial War on Terror discourses construct masculinities and femininities according to race, manipulating and deploying representations of the ‘Other’ to justify military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature

Abstract: Preface Introduction 1 The Rise of Arab-American Literature 2 The Gibran Phenomenon 3 The Emergence of Autobiography 4 The Retreat of Cultural Translation 5 Exilic Memoirs 6 Academic Itineraries 7 Postcolonial Translation 8 Muslim Immigrant Fiction 9 Queering Orientalism Conclusion Works Cited

Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel

Abstract: Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how "Oriental" tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction "Enlightenment Orientalism", he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of "Oriental" tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, "Oriental" tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that "Enlightenment Orientalism" was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, "Enlightenment Orientalism" is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.

Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt

Abstract: In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt—by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882—in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim. Tageldin finds that the encounter with European Orientalism often invited colonized Egyptians to imagine themselves “equal” to or even “masters” of their colonizers, and thus, paradoxically, to translate themselves toward—virtually into—the European. Moving beyond the domination/resistance binary that continues to govern understandings of colonial history, Tageldin redefines cultural imperialism as a politics of translational seduction, a politics that lures the colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it, thereby repressing its inherent inequalities. She considers, among others, the interplays of Napoleon and Hasan al-'Attar; Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Silvestre de Sacy, and Joseph Agoub; Cromer, 'Ali Mubarak, Muhammad al-Siba'i, and Thomas Carlyle; Ibrahim 'Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, and Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat; and Salama Musa, G. Elliot Smith, Naguib Mahfouz, and Lawrence Durrell. In conversation with new work on translation, comparative literature, imperialism, and nationalism, Tageldin engages postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak to Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Emile Benveniste, and Jacques Derrida.

Edward Said's Orientalism and the Study of the Self and the Other in Orwell's Burmese Days

Abstract: Critics unanimously regard Said’s Orientalism as the cornerstone of postcolonial canon. It was this celebrated work that generated other related books and materials. Orientalism is a Western style for Orientalizing the Orient, i.e. how from knowledge of the Orient particularly from nineteenth century the Orient is defined by a set of recurring images and cliches and how afterwards this knowledge of the Orient is put into practice by colonialism and imperialism. Orientalism is affiliated with the representation of the Self or Occident and the Other or Orient in which the Self is privileged and has upper hand to define, reconstruct the passive, silent and weak Other. For Said, this geographical line made between the Occident and the Orient is arbitrary and numerous Western scholars, orientalists such as Burton, Lane, Lyall, Massignon, among others and literary figures like Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Austin, Flaubert, Kipling, Conrad, etc. contributed to the shaping of this discourse about the Orient and/or misrepresenting the Orient. Orwell as a Western writer was born in India and served five years in Indian Imperial Police in Burma and one of his major concerns during his life was the issue of imperialism and colonialism which is reflected in many works such as Burmese Days, Shooting an Elephant, Marrakech and Hanging. One characteristic which is shared among these western works and similar ones is the author’s conflicting feelings within them about the Orient and Orientals through Western’s lens. In this study, the relationship of the representer or Westerners and the represented or Easterners is fully expounded in Burmese Days in the light of Said’s Orientalism.Key words: Edward Said; Orientalism; Binary opposition; Orwell; The Self and the Other; Burmese Days

Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam

Abstract: Preface I. The Problem: Islam as a Holistic System II. Edward Said's Orientalism and His Critics III. Globalization, World Society and the Global Public Sphere: Understanding Multiple Modernities IV. State, Science and Religion: Modern Europe Between Positivism and Christian Apology V. Islam as a Problem:A" The Formation of Islamic Studies VI. Orientalist Constructions, Islamic Reform and Islamist Revolution VII. Epilog

The heritage of Soviet Oriental studies

Abstract: Dedication Preface Foreword: The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies - Stephan Conermann Introduction: Integrating Soviet Oriental Studies - Michael Kemper Part I: Metropolitan Oriental Studies 1 .The Imperial Roots of Soviet Orientology - David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye 2. Profiles under Pressure: Orientalists in Petrograd/Leningrad, 1918-56 - Mikhail Rodionov 3. Between the 'Language of Humanity' and Latinizatsiia: Nikolai Marr and the Oriental Department of the State Public Library in Leningrad - Aleksei Asvaturov 4. The Contribution of Oriental Scholarship to the Soviet Anti-Islamic Discourse: From the Union of Militant Atheists to the Knowledge Society - Vladimir Bobrovnikov 5. Soviet Kurdology and Kurdish Orientalism - Michiel Leezenberg 6. Evgenii M. Primakov: Arabist and KGB Middleman, Director and Statesman - Mikhail Roshchin 7. The Leningrad/St. Petersburg School of Scientific Islamology - Stanislav M. Prozorov 8. Hijacking Islam: The Search for a New Soviet Interpretation of Political Islam in 1980 - Hanna E. Jansen and Michael Kemper 9. Scholars, Advisers and State-Builders: Soviet Afghan Studies in the Light of Present-Day Afghan Development - Anna R. Paterson Part II: Oriental Studies and National Historiography in the Republics 10. The Struggle for the Reestablishment of Oriental Studies in Twentieth-Century Kazan - Mirkasym A. Usmanov 11. Arabic Historical Studies in Twentieth-Century Daghestan - Amri R. Shikhsaidov 12. The Politics of Scholarship and the Scholarship of Politics: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Scholars Studying Tajikistan - Lisa Yountchi 13. Conceiving a People's History: The 1920-1936 Discourse on the Kazakh Past - Zifa-Alua Auezova 14. Ahmad Yasavi and the Divan-i hikmat in Soviet Scholarship - Devin DeWeese 15. Kyrgyz - Muslim - Central Asian? Recent Approaches to the Study of Kyrgyz Culture in Kyrgyzstan - Till Mostowlansky 16. The Transformation of Azerbaijani Orientalists into Islamic Thinkers after 1991- Altay Goyushov, Naomi Caffee and Robert Denis Index Authors

Views of ancient Egypt since Napoleon Bonaparte : imperialism, colonialism and modern appropriations

Abstract: * Introduction:Two Hundred Years of Ancient Egypt: Modern History and Ancient Archaeology* Imperialist Appropriations of Egyptian Obelisks Art and Antiquities for Government's Sake* 'Purveyor-General to the Hieroglyphics': Sir William Gell and the Development of Egyptology* Sarah Belzoni and her Mummy: The Beginnings of the Egyptological Collections at Brussels* Some Egyptology Sidelights on the Egyptian War of 1882* Forgers, Scholars and International Prestige: Ancient Egypt and Iberia* Trans-Atlantic Pyramidology, Orientalism and Empire: Ancient Egypt and the 19th Century Archaeological Experience of Mesoamerica* Egypt and the Diffusion of Culture* Approaching the Peasantry of Greco-Roman Egypt: From Rostovtzeff to Rhetoric* The British and the Copts* Egypt and the Archaeology of the Disenfranchised* Forgetting the Ancien Regime: Republican Values and the Study of the Ancient Orient

Tributary Empires in Global History

Abstract: Figures and Maps Preface Notes on Contributors Tributary Empires: Towards a Global and Comparative History P.F.Bang & C.A.Bayly PART I: HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF EMPIRE Religion, Liberalism and Empires: British Historians and their Indian Critics in the Nineteenth Century C.A.Bayly Orientalism and Classicism: the British-Roman Empire of Lord Bryce and his Italian Critics F.De Donno The New Order and the Fate of the Old: The Historiographical Construction of an Ottoman ancien regime in the Nineteenth century B.Tezcan PART II: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON EMPIRE Empire as a Topic in Comparative Sociology W.G.Runciman Early Imperial Formations in Africa and the Segmentation of Power M.Tymowski Post-Nomadic Empires: From the Mongols to the Mughals A.Wink The Process of Empire: Frontiers and Borderlands D.Ludden The Emblematic Province: Sicily from the Roman Empire to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies G.Salmeri PART III: COMPARATIVE HISTORIES Lord of All the World: the State, Heterogeneous Power and Hegemony in the Roman and Mughal Empires P.F.Bang Fiscal Regimes and the 'First Great Divergence' between Eastern and Western Eurasia W.Scheidel Late Rome and the Arab Caliphate C.Wickham Returning the Household to the Tributary Empire Model: Gender, Succession, and Ritual in the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Empires S.Blake Comparisons Across Empires: The Critical Social Structures of the Ottomans, Russians and Habsburgs during the Seventeenth Century K.Barkey & R.Batzell Endnotes Bibliography Index

Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760

Abstract: China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a model of economic and political strength, viewed by many as the greatest empire in the world. While the importance of China to eighteenth-century English consumer culture is well documented, less so is its influence on English values. Through a careful study of the literature, drama, philosophy, and material culture of the period, this book articulates how Chinese culture influenced English ideas about virtue. Discourses of virtue were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies. Chi-ming Yang focuses on key forms of virtue-heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism-whose meanings and social importance developed in the changing economic climate of the period. She highlights the ways in which English understandings of Eastern values transformed these morals. The book is organized by type of performance-theatrical, ethnographic, and literary-and by performances of gender, identity fraud, and religious conversion. In her analysis of these works, Yang brings to light surprising connections between figures as disparate as Confucius and a Chinese Amazon and between cultural norms as far removed as Hindu reincarnation and London coffeehouse culture. Part of a new wave of cross-disciplinary scholarship, where Chinese studies meets the British eighteenth century, this novel work will appeal to scholars in a number of fields, including performance studies, East Asian studies, British literature, cultural history, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

Mapping frontiers across medieval Islam : geography, translation and the ʿAbbāsid Empire

Abstract: The story of the 9th-century caliphal mission from Baghdad to discover the legendary barrier against the apocalyptic nations of Gog and Magog mentioned in the Quran, has been either dismissed as superstition or treated as historical fact By exploring the intellectual and literary history surrounding the production and early reception of this adventure, Travis Zadeh traces the conceptualization of frontiers within early 'Abbasid society and re-evaluates the modern treatment of marvels and monsters inhabiting medieval Islamic descriptions of the world Examining the roles of translation, descriptive geography, and salvation history in the projection of early 'Abbasid imperial power, this book is essential for all those interested in Islamic studies, the 'Abbasid dynasty and its politics, geography, religion, Arabic and Persian literature and European Orientalism

China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC

Abstract: This book argues that there is a new, Sinological form of orientalism at work in the world. It has shifted from a logic of ‘essential difference’ to one of ‘sameness’ or general equivalence. "China" is now in a halting but inevitable process of becoming-the-same as the USA and the West. Orientalism is now closer to the cultural logic of capitalism, even as it shows the afterlives of colonial discourse. This shift reflects our era of increasing globalization; the migration of orientalism to area studies and the pax Americana; the liberal triumph at the "end" of history and the demonization of Maoism; an ever closer Sino-West relationship; and the overlapping of anti-communist and colonial discourses. To make the case for this re-constitution of orientalism, this work offers an inter-disciplinary analysis of the China field broadly defined. Vukovich takes on specialist work on the politics, governance, and history of the Mao and reform eras, from the Great Leap Forward to Tiananmen, 1989; the Western study of Chinese film; recent work in critical theory which turns on ‘the China-reference"; and other global texts about or from China. Through extensive analysis, the production of Sinological knowledge is shown to be of a piece with Western global intellectual political culture. This work will be of great interest to scholars of Asian, postcolonial and cultural studies.

Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema

Abstract: Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema Jane Chi Hyun Park. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Yellow Future: Oriental Style proposes that "oriental style" - both images and racialized performances function to link East Asian peoples and places to a hightech Orient, but also to Orientalize (non)white bodies. The book discusses Asiaphilia and Asiaphobia that operates as two sides of the same ideological coin masking whiteness as the norm, and provides a compelling genealogy of late nineteenth through to early twentieth century Hollywood films portraying "East Asia as the future" [italics original] (viii). Significantly, the author's work is the first to analyze the Orientalist backdrop in Hollywood films that profoundly shape the filmic narrative and characters in movies, including Batman Begins (Ch. 2) and The Matrix (Ch. 5), although it also raises important questions, including: "What kinds of stories and attitudes about Asia and its relationship to the West are these movies telling and selling? And how do these images and narratives influence the way nonAsians see Asians and the way people of Asian descent, especially in the United States, see themselves?" (162). Yellow Future consists of an introduction, along with six chapters, an afterword, and an index. Chapter one reviews Orientalism and introduces "techno-orientalism" that became prevalent during the 1980s, when Japan posed an economic threat to the United States, and is still used in contemporary films to project an inhumane, violent, and not-so-bright yellow future. Park superbly connects techno-orientalism, as coined by media studies critics David Morley and Kevin Robins and discussed by technocultural scholars Wendy Chun and Lisa Nakamura, with the sociopolitical impact of racialized representations, as advanced by cultural theorists Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and bell hooks. Chapter two opens with an example of the techno-oriental style and provides a concise history of the development of American Orientalism in film. As Park argues, the movie Batman Begins (2005) utilizes "representation^] of Asiatic tropes through the discourses of technological advancement [e.g. Batman's weapons and gadgets] and racial progressivisim [that] undergirds the primary ideological conflicts in the film" (29). Yellow Peril's body chapters offer insightful, close readings of Oriental imagery in Hollywood films of the 1980s and 1990s, when the industry commodified and obsessively repeated "Asiatic tropes set against the larger backdrop of a de facto mixed race future" (165). Chapter three analyzes "the perilist aspects of Orientalism" in Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick's novel) that displaced the Asiatic Other onto the spaces of a dark and dirty American metropolis (over)run by merchants operating fast-food stalls (66). Stylistically, the portrayal of a ghettoized American metropolis of the future is reinforced by ominous taiko drumming and by quick shots of bicyclists in Asian straw hats. Park further suggests that, "the appeal of film noir lies in the viewer's identification with the usually male protagonist as he makes a series of bad choices that pull him into psychological states of paranoia, cynicism, and emotional numbness not unlike those experienced by war veterans suffering from shell shock" (60). Harrison Ford's embodiment of the lead character, Rick Deckard, extends the category of Richard Dyer's "dark white male," which Park discusses in her analysis of The Matrix (1999) in Chapter six. Chapter four, titled "Oriental Buddies and the Disruption of Whiteness" discusses critically the comingof-age classic The Karate Kid (1984). Yellow Future identifies The Karate Kid as a US-centric, "biracial buddy film" marketing the transcendence of national, racial, and cultural differences through the mythologizing of Japan, whose culture? "especially those traits associated with honor, integrity, and productivity" - serves to resuscitate the (Anglo) American spirit (8586). …

Rethinking Orientalism: Colonialism and the Study of Indian Traditions

Abstract: it is a commonplace today to claim that the term “hinduism” came into general use in the nineteenth century. it is said to be derived from “hindooism,” first employed in 1787 by the missionary and later director of the east india Company Charles grant. 1 The subsequent construction of hinduism is said to have been a part of the British colonial project to impose conceptual and administrative order upon a world alien to them. 2 Though written primarily with the middle east in view, edward said’s study of the Western representations of the orient can also be applied in the study of indian traditions. in the process of applying said’s critique to the study of indian traditions, postcolonial scholarship has advanced two important claims: (a) orientalism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries systematized europe’s knowledge about the indian traditions into rigid, homogenous categories, and (b) these categories played a crucial role in the functioning of

The Orientalized Orients and the Utilitarian Colonialization in Aime Cesaire's Play “A Tempest”

Abstract: Postcolonialism, as the harbinger of twenty-first century’s critical outlooks, encompasses and gives far more meaning to the classical work of literature, as Shakespeare, to even the most recent ones as Cesaire. It is one of the broad schools of thought and philosophy that deeply indebted to the ideas and studies of a colonized scholar and thinker called Edward Said. “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe”, Said states in his Orientalism, “it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (Said, 12). So, the postcolonial studies consider a “continuing process of resistance and reconstruction” (Reader, 22). Regarding the school of postcolonialism and Cesaire’s work called “A Tempest”; this study concentrates on Orientalism, the hegemony, orientalization, and utilitarianism in the colonized nations, as viewed in this play and as applied from the school. Said’s postcolonial elements, such as Orientalized Orient and Civilizing mission, to choose as the two basic issues of postcolonialism, are applicable and seen through this play. Cesaire’s ‘A Tempest’ is the postcolonial revision of William Shakespeare’s’ The Tempest’; in which he tries to show the reactions of the colonizer and the colonized. The major character of the play, Prospero makes his mind up to carry out his civilizing mission and through this decision, he gave meaning to his life and brings the colonizeds to be orientalized. This paper is to fulfill a contemplation over the ways one can colonize a land and its people based on Edward Said’s ideas represented in his masterpiece Orientalism (1978), regarding the events in ‘A Tempest’. Finally the study comes to the conclusion that the colonizer tries to exploit land and people of other land by simply defining a discourse in which a binary opposition makes it easy to define one as superior and another as inferior. Therefore, through the colonization the colonizer takes control of the land and people, while their worth is only based of the utilitarian views. Key words : Orientalized Orient; Orientalism; Civilizing Mission; Hegemony; Utilitarianism

From the 'Turkish Menace' to Exoticism and Orientalism: Islam as Antithesis of Europe (1453–1914)? From the 'Turkish Menace' to Orientalism

Abstract: During their often difficult encounters with their Muslim neighbours in North Africa and the Middle East over many centuries, Europeans developed various discourses describing Islam and Muslims as 'the other' These discourses of alterity helped to affirm European identity and to spread various prejudices and stereotypes that proved very durable, though they were subject to ongoing change This survey article analyses the image of Islam from the mid-15th to the early 20th century It focuses on the perception of Islam that prevailed during the Renaissance and Reformation, which was based on religious differences and was influenced by the perceived threat of the Ottoman Empire It thematizes the transformation of this image around 1700 as an enthusiasm for the Orient, which emphasized its exoticness, developed and as secular considerations began to take precedence over religious criteria The article also examines Orientalist discourses of the 19th century that were informed by a European sense of superiority and that defined Europe and Islam as two antithetical civilizations

Kipling, the Orient, and Orientals: "Orientalism" Reoriented?

Abstract: Rudyard Kipling and Edward Said are influential figures in reconstructing Western attitudes to the East. Kipling’s comments on the “East” outside India, however, show a different picture from Said’s Orientalism paradigm of negative portrayals of the Orient, which included Kipling as a typical Orientalist supremacist. Kipling emphasized threats from China rather than from the Muslim world. Kipling also had a range of positive comments on Burma, Japan, and Tibet, reflecting a common Buddhist substratum that Kipling seems to have appreciated. Consequently, both the perception of Kipling and the application of Said’s paradigm need adjustment and reorientation.

Musical Voyages and Their Baggage: Orientalism in Music and Critical Musicology

Abstract: The word “orientalism,” largely as a result of Edward Said’s 1978 book, has in recent decades generated a good deal of attention in musicology, music criticism and in critical writing about the other arts. Inconveniently, though, the word has a long history and more than one meaning. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1973) gives the most traditional one, tucking orientalism under the word orient with the brief, bland definition “oriental character, style, or quality,” with orientalist being “one versed in oriental languages and literature.” This is close to the definition that Said famously interrogated and unpacked, documenting and meditating upon the myriad ways in which the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of the eastern world could amount to the appropriation, control, and ultimately marginalization and trivialization of those cultures and peoples—which might or might not include those of Africa, but certainly would include the Middle East, Far East, and the Indian subcontinent. Said’s expose study, even given certain flaws and broad-brush oversimplifications, was pathbreaking in that it deconstructed what was often unreflectively considered to be a great constellation of respected academic disciplines, calling attention to their often unacademic—even inhumane— foundational assumptions and (in some measure) imperial goals. It is in this and related senses that “orientalism” is now most often used, and critical perspectives that occupy themselves with orientalism and its consequences have for some time been called postcolonial. Postcolonial criticism, generally speaking, seeks to identify and resistantly read artworks and documents in which an “oriental” flavor or undercurrent is present and thereby working in a subliminal, nonneutral way. Given the relationship of postcolonial music criticism to the broader area of cultural criticism, such “oriental” spice is rarely considered to be benign or beneficial, and this has resulted in a gradual reduction of the complexities and layers of meaning

The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies

Abstract: Michael Kemper and Stephan Conermann, eds. The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies. Routledge Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe Series, 25. London: Routledge, 2011. 352 pp. Index. $150.00, cloth.The present volume brings together twenty scholars from the West and the post-Soviet space with the goal of providing an "integrating view on Soviet Oriental studies" (p. 1). The latter is understood in the double sense of presenting these studies as a single discipline and relating them to the on-going discussion of Orientalism. Against the prevailing perception of Soviet Orientology as hopelessly isolated and ideologized, the editors and contributors to the volume argue that it fits rather well Edward Said's view of Western Orientalism as peculiar nexus of knowledge and power. At the same time, Soviet Oriental studies had a number of important peculiarities and legacies that make them a subject worthy of investigation. The volume is divided into two parts, of which the first, including nine articles, traces the evolution of Oriental and Islamic studies in Moscow and Leningrad/St. Petersburg. The seven articles of the second part of the volume examine Oriental studies in the republics of the former Soviet Union and two provincial centres of the Russian Federation.The objective set by the editors is quite timely: after Kritika broke new ground by organizing a discussion on pre-revolutionary Russian Orientalism ten years ago, it was only logical to ask similar questions about its Soviet successor. Although the volume focuses on the Soviet period, several articles briefly discuss pre- 1917 developments, while David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye' s piece is devoted entirely to the peculiarities of imperial Orientology. These included, among other things, the division of labour between the more academically oriented Oriental studies of St. Petersburg versus the more practical profile of the Kazan and the Moscow schools, the desire of the government to impose advisory functions upon Orientalist scholars and their resistance to this pressure in the name of scientific objectivity.The most important pre-revolutionary legacy was of course the Orientalists themselves. Similar to other "bourgeois experts" during the early Soviet decades, prerevolutionary Orientalist scholars went through hardships and travails, which are discussed by Mikhail Rodionov and several other contributors. Still, Soviet terror was mixed with opportunity, as Michael Kemper notes in the introductory chapter. In the context of Soviet nationalities policy, Orientalists were supposed to produce the ideologically correct historical narratives for the "titular nationalities" of the Eastern republics of the USSR. This phenomenon is discussed in detail in Aifa-Alua Auezova's chapter on Kazakh historiography of the 1 920 s and 1 930 s and receives some attention from other contributors to the second part of the volume.While Orientology had a special role in the Soviet nationality policy, the latter in rum influenced the Oriental scholars in a number of ways. First, there occurred a significant nativization of Oriental studies in comparison with the pre-1917 period. The number of indigenous scholars from the Eastern borderlands (traditionally high in Imperial Russia) became even higher under the Soviets. Second, nativization policies determined the distribution of centres of Oriental studies. Alongside Moscow and St. Petersburg/Leningrad, these were created in Tashkent, Baku, Tbilisi, Dushanbe, and Yerevan (which were all the capitals of "Eastern" union republics), but not in Kazan or Makhachkala (which were and continue to be the capitals of the autonomous Tatar and Dagestan republics within the RSFSR/Russian Federation), despite important prerevolutionary traditions and/or strong local initiative.The Soviet encounter with Islam was another major conditioning factor for the development of Soviet Oriental studies. In a highly interesting contribution, Vladimir Bobrovnikov addresses the relations between Soviet Orientology and anti-religious propaganda. …

The Muslim World in British Historical Imaginations: ‘Re-thinking Orientalism’?

Abstract: Ever since the publication of Orientalism in 1978 there has been a great deal of debate about Edward Said's thesis and propositions. His study has provoked much controversy but it has also generate...

The Turk and Islam in the Western eye, 1450-1750 : visual imagery before orientalism

Abstract: Contents: Introduction, James G. Harper Part I Venice: The sultan's true face? Gentile Bellini, Mehmet II, and the values of verisimilitude, Elizabeth Rodini Black Turks: Venetian artists and perceptions of Ottoman ethnicity, Paul H.D. Kaplan 'And the moon has started to bleed' apocalypticism and religious reform in Venetian art at the time of the Battle of Lepanto, Benjamin Paul Punchinello meets the Turk: Giambattista Tiepolo's chorus of oriental spectators and the transformation of cultural otherness, Johanna Fassl. Part II Italy and Europe: Bipolar behavior: Ferdinando I de'Medici and the East, Christopher Pastore Durer's depictions of the Ottoman Turks: a case of 'early modern orientalism'?, Heather Madar East is East: images of the Turkish nemesis in the Hapsburg world, Larry Silver The barbarous and noble enemy: pictorial representations of the Battle of Lepanto, Christina Strunck. Part III Beyond Europe: Picturing the Ottoman threat in 16th-century New Spain, Maria Judith Feliciano The Frank in the Ottoman eye of 1583, Baki Tezcan Selected secondary bibliography Index.

Orientalism on the Margins: The Ottoman Empire under Russian Eyes

Abstract: Throughout its modern history, Russia was more frequently at war with the Ottoman Empire than with any other power. Russo-Ottoman wars took place between the late 17th and the late 19th centuries and were paralleled by other forms of contact, including captivity, religious pilgrimages, diplomacy, and later tourism and scientific exploration. (1) The intensity of this interaction is reflected in the voluminous literature about the Ottoman Empire that was published in Russian before 1917. (2) Russian and translated Western accounts of captivity, religious and secular travelogues, memoirs, and statistical descriptions are noteworthy not only because they were numerous, but because before the (remarkably late) appearance of osmanistika as a separate branch of Orientalist science devoted to Ottoman Turkey, these nonscholarly writings contained the quasi-totality of Russian knowledge about the rival empire. (3) Aimed at a wide audience, these materials can plausibly be taken as evidence of more or less widespread assumptions that educated Russians held about Ottoman Turkey at least until the 1840s, when there appeared the first general descriptions written by professional Orientalists for nonspecialists. (4) By virtue of their sheer number, these publications constituted the basic horizon for those who engaged in highbrow intellectual discussions as well as for those who limited themselves to the passive reading of thick journals and newspapers. Through them, the Ottoman Empire emerged as an element of the mental background against which Russian intellectuals later discussed their country's relation to Asia and Europe. (5) An analysis of these sources is timely for at least two reasons. First, contacts with Ottoman Turkey constitute an aspect of Russia's "discovery of the Orient" that remains unappreciated in the modern historiography of Russian Orientalism. In the wake of the important work that has been done on "Russia's own Orient" in the last 15 years, it might be worthwhile to turn to the "Orient" beyond the empire's borders in order to describe its function in the Russian imperial imagination. (6) Second, discussions of Russian views of "Europe" and "Asia" are sometimes too quick to subsume actual political entities under these rather problematic categories. Before the "Orient" became a space of European colonial dominance (in which Russia had its own share), it bore the concrete name of Ottoman (Persian, Manchu) Empire and constituted a formidable, if diminishing, military challenge. The problem to be addressed is precisely how Orientalist discourse came to structure the perception of one continental empire by the elite of another. (7) This article examines the Orientalization of the Ottoman Empire in Russian literature before the middle of the 19th century and its role in the articulation of modern Russian identity. The symbolic construction of a rival empire as the "Orient" served to sustain the representation of Russia as part of "Europe" against claims to the contrary. This perception of the "Other" did not emerge overnight. Instead, it crystallized gradually in the context of the Russian elite's conscious and systematic search for models that resulted in Russia's Westernization. Launched by Peter the Great, this process led to the discovery of differences between the empire of the sultans and other powers. These differences, in turn, served as the basis for the Orientalization of Ottoman Turkey that occurred under the combined impact of the Russo-Ottoman wars and of the Russian elite's growing familiarity with Western accounts of the Ottoman Empire. The wars demonstrated the superiority of the European military models adopted by Peter and his successors, while translations of French and British Orientalist texts provided the language to articulate this new sense of superiority. At some point, Russian accounts of the Ottoman Empire started to follow closely the Western model of Orientalist description. …

Sympathy and India in British literature, 1770-1830

Abstract: List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Edmund Burke and the Trial of Warren Hastings 'No less pious than sublime': the Sympathetic Vision of Sir William Jones Sympathy in a Hot Climate: British and Indian Subjects at the turn of the century Gothic Sympathy and Missionary Writing 'Oriental' versus 'Orientalist' Poetry: the Debate in Romantic Period Literary Criticism Epilogue: Orientalism under Pressure Bibliography Index

An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art

Abstract: Acknowledgements Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1: A Time of Transition Social Critique Moral Reform Monarch as Model Era of Change Age of Discovery Grand Tour Antiquity Becomes Fashionable Neoclassical Style Calm Grandeur in Dante Conclusion Chapter 2: Classical Influences and Radical Transformations Neoclassicm in Britain Neoclassicism Becomes Popular The Elgin Marbles Homer Illustrations Political Instability in France D'Angiviller's Reform Program Roman Virtue Neoclassical Eroticism Neoclassical Sculpture Neoclassicism in Denmark and the German States Conclusion Chapter 3: Re-presenting Contemporary History Legitimizing Contemporary History Painting of Contemporary History in France Political Instability New Hero for a New Republic Equestrian Portraits: Rulers on Horseback Neoclassicism made Ridiculous Legitimizing Bonaparte Transgressive History Painting Representing Republican Values Establishing Museums Conclusion Chapter 4: Romanticism Origins and Characteristics Burke's Sublime Blake and the Imagination Nature Mysticism Goya: Ambiguity and Modernism Abnormal Mental States Sculpture Escape to the National Past: England Medievalism in France: Troubadour Style Medievalism in the German States The Nazarenes Conclusion Chapter 5: Shifting Focus: Art and the Natural World New Attitudes Toward Nature Academic Landscape Tradition Nature and the Sublime The Picturesque Turner: From Convention to Innovation Constable: Conservative Nostalgia Naturalism and Tourism Friedrich: Patriotism and Spirituality Feminization of Nature Hudson River School American West Conclusion Chapter 6: Colonialism, Imperialism, Orientalism Documenting Distant Lands and People Colonial Citizens Picturing Slavery Native Americans: Ideal or Foe? Orientalism Emerges Orient Imagined Delacroix's Orientalism Orientalist Sculpture International Exhibitions Conclusion Chapter 7: New Audiences, New Approaches Modernism, Urbanization, Instability Bourgeois Morality and the Separation of Spheres Biedermeier and the Emergence of Middle Class Culture Biedermeier Portraiture Biedermeier Cityscapes Biedermeier Peasant Painting Biedermeier Landscape Biedermeier History Painting Golden Age in Denmark Biedermeier in Russia Mid-Century America Victorian Painting Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Municipal Art Associations Conclusion Chapter 8: Photography as Fact and Fine Art "Invention" of Photography Documenting Current Events Social Reform Photography and Science Portraiture Landscape Travel Photography as a Fine Art Pictorialism and New Technologies Conclusion Chapter 9: Realism and the Urban Poor Contrasting Responses to 1848 Urban Migration Social Unrest Alcoholism Female Suicide Middle Class Working Women Poor Working Women Prostitution Documenting Work Idealized Labor Oppressed Workers Reforming the Poor Conclusion Chapter 10: Imagined Communities: Views of Peasant Life Peasant Identity Peasant Imagery Before 1848 Courbet's Burial: More than Just a Funeral Academically Acceptable Peasant Images Powerful Peasants: Heroic or Threatening? Pitiable Peasants Idealized Peasants Grim Realities Conclusion Chapter 11: Crisis in the Academy The Importance of Titles History Painting and Autobiography: Courbet The Situation of Women Artists Salon of 1863 and Salon des Refuses Salon of 1865 Sculpture and Politics Foreign Artists in Paris Art Academies in Austria and the German States Menzel and Academic Realism World's Fairs Conclusion Chapter 12: Impressionism Truth Haussmannization New Paris Flaneurs and Boulevardiers Experimentation Old Paris Bourgeois Leisure Cafe Society Suburban Industry Suburban Leisure Natural and Acquired Identities Gare Saint Lazare Seaside Resorts Beaches, Bathing, and Hygiene Cezanne and Postimpressionism The Macchiaioli Conclusion Chapter 13: Symbolism Symbolist Precursors Animate Nature Music Music and Genius Rodin: Abstract Ideas in Human Form Pessimistic Withdrawal Women: Angels or Whores? Imagination Out of Control Virgin Mothers Social Pessimism Memory and Degeneration Gauguin: Seeking But Never Finding Van Gogh: Expressing Nature Genius and Creativity Beyond the Five Senses Conclusion Chapter 14: Individualism and Collectivism Artists' Colonies Pont Aven Worpswede Skagen Artist Organizations Society of Independent Artists The Nabis Rose + Croix Les XX National Identity France : Monet's Cathedrals Russia Serbia Poland Finland Hungary Conclusion Epilogue: Looking Toward the Twentieth Century Bibliography Glossary Index