Showing papers on "Orientalism published in 2019"

Governing Armenia: The Politics of Development and the Making of Global Diaspora

Abstract: Author(s): Zablotsky, Veronika | Advisor(s): Dent, Gina | Abstract: This dissertation reconsiders the history of Armenian displacement from the standpoint of feminist and postcolonial theory. It investigates how colonial imaginaries of the Armenian nation were produced by trans-imperial entanglements between the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic since the early modern period in order to develop a postcolonial critique of neoliberal development in post-Soviet Armenia. Building on Edward Said’s framework of Orientalism, it argues that constructions of Armenians as representatives of the “West” in the “East” not only disarticulated Armenian claims to indigeneity in West Asia but also facilitated the global expansion of colonial logics of race and empire. The four chapters of this thesis deploy a mixed methodology that combines empirical and archival research with analyses of textual and visual materials to rethink the concept of emancipation in West Asia. They draw on a range of sources from novels and memoirs, including "The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin" (1792), to diplomatic reports, newspaper articles, and naturalization cases that determined whether Armenians were to be categorized as “free white persons” in the United States. Furthermore, they discuss the silent film "Auction of Souls" (1919) alongside images and photographs of Armenian orphans by Near East Relief, the writings of Fridtjof Nansen and Karen Jeppe, among others, as well as images and illustrations in an Armenian-language Soviet women’s journal. Based on open-ended interviews and participant observation among diasporic reformers in post-Soviet Armenia’s non-governmental development sector, this thesis demonstrates that neoliberal development in post-Soviet Armenia actualizes colonial logics that preceded and exceded Soviet statecraft. By contrasting the early Soviet project of women’s emancipation with the inter-war mandate system in the Middle East, and colonial subjection by the English joint-stock corporation in South Asia, it develops an alternative account of globalization that offers a postcolonial approach to postsocialism and diaspora in West Asia. Drawing on critical race and political theory, it concludes that moving toward collective futures beyond the colonial gaze will require emancipation from the logic of development, or “developmentality,” as a rationality of government.

Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order

Abstract: This chapter examines the distinctiveness of the modern representational order exemplified by the world exhibition. It explains the connection between the world- as-exhibition and Orientalism, through a rereading of European travel accounts of the nineteenth-century Middle East. The world exhibitions of the second half of the century offered the visitor exactly this educational encounter, with natives and their artifacts arranged to provide the direct experience of a colonized object-world. Despite the determined efforts to isolate the exhibition as merely an artificial representation of a reality outside, the real world beyond the gates turned out to be more and more like an extension of the exhibition. The representation of the Orient, in its attempt to be detached and objective, would seek to eliminate from the picture the presence of the European observer. Orientalism is part of a method of order and truth essential to the peculiar nature of the modern world.

Confucianism and Capitalist Development: From Max Weber and Orientalism to Lee Kuan Yew and New Confucianism

Abstract: Using Said’s orientalism as an analytical framework, this article situates the contemporary Confucian revival within a longue duree of cultural discourse originating in the nineteenth century. From...

Orientalism and Representations of China in the Early 19th Century: A Case Study of The Chinese Repository

Abstract: This research focuses on representations of China in English in the early 19th century by Western visitors and residents attracted by trade and missionary opportunities. This was the second major wave of western commentators on China following the Jesuits from the 16th to 18th centuries. As in the earlier case the main commentators are Christian missionaries, but in the 19th century they were mainly British and American protestant missionaries bringing a different world view to China. This world view was conditioned by their religion and their sense of superiority based on the relative decline of China in technological and institutional terms compared to the time of the Jesuits. Their views were widely disseminated in the West, and they became both theoretical and literal interpreters (as a result of their language expertise missionaries were employed as interpreters) for Western policy makers. There were three distinct groups of Westerners: merchants, diplomats and missionaries. The missionaries were the most intellectually curious and hence the most active commentators on China, but at the same time were the most inflexible in the framework of understanding they took to China. They also had different concerns and attitudes towards China, compared to the other groups, such as on the opium trade in China. Missionaries are selected as the main subjects for observation in this research. There are three main research questions: firstly, how did the Protestant missionaries from the early 19th century represent China to Western readers in their publications—primarily in The Chinese Repository, and why did they represent China in the ways they did? Do these representations share some common characteristics or patterns? To what extent were these representations motivated by a framework of expectations that arose from their Western backgrounds? The main data used in this research is from The Chinese Repository. It was the first English journal devoted to offering a comprehensive introduction to Sinology. It was published between 1832 and 1851, and it witnessed the outbreak of the first Opium War and the change of discourse that occurred over that period. Around 60 articles are selected from the journal to analyse how missionaries represented China and to suggest some reasons for this. The main theoretical framework of the research is orientalism propounded by Edward Said in 1978. It is approached by two dimensions: a micro dimension which focuses on the book itself published in 1978 and American scholars’ feedback in the decade following its publication, and macro dimension which concentrates on Chinese scholars’ views of orientalism from the 1990s onwards and Western scholars’ new interpretations in the 21st century. I transpose the notion of orientalism from the 20th century Middle East to the 19th century Chinese context, and apply this notion to analyse missionaries’ representations of the Chinese language, religion and society. I believe that the orientalism has different contextual manifestations: in other words, it should be ‘topic-sensitive’. I find that within the framework of orientalism missionaries adopted three different specific approaches in representing China: syncretism, fundamentalism and progressivism. They used these to inform and reconcile what they found in China with the framework of understanding derived from their religious beliefs and their socio-political view of the world.

Reading the Eastern Question through the Prism of Orientalism: Hubris, Founding Genealogy and James Bryce

Abstract: Can Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism be useful to reinterpret the widely accepted and long-lasting perceptions about the atrocities committed against the Armenians during World War I? A...

(Un)reading Orientalism in Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina

Abstract: Oriental representations of Muslims are often manifested in a society's media, literature, theatre and other creative means of expression. However, these representations, which are often historically and conceptually one-sided, have adverse repercussions for Muslims today, potentially leading to Islamophobia. Orientalism of Muslims in Western writings and discourses have been much discussed, debated and disproved, yet some works of literature continue to disseminate many of the earlier Oriental assertions about Islam/Muslims: that of being terrorists, misogynists, barbaric or uncivilized compared to the civilized West. Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina (2008) chronicles the history of Islam from the time of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, through the voice of his youngest wife Aisha. This paper argues that there is more to the image of the Muslim than what is portrayed by Western writers. Through an “(un)reading” of Sherry Jones’ text, this paper unravels the misconceptions regarding early and forced marriage with a view to address the ways in which these misconceptions could lead to Islamophobia. Using Edward Said's theory of Contrapuntal reading, which urges the colonized to unread Western canonical texts to unearth the submerged details, this paper identifies and puts to question non-conforming depictions of Muslims in Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina (2008) – while placing the text in its historical space – in an effort to mitigate the growing stereotyping of Muslims and to address misconceptions with regard to Islamic history.

Citizenship in Asian history

Abstract: This article introduces a special issue of Citizenship Studies in which historians of East, South and Southeast Asia continue the project of globalizing citizenship by analyzing practices and conce...

Orientalism and the British Picture Postcard Industry: Popularizing the Empire in Victorian and Edwardian Homes

Abstract: During the 19th century as and when Europeans developed a keen interest in what was described as the ‘Orient’—ranging from architecture in Moorish Spain to the faces and places in Northern Africa and the Middle East–—images of an exotic fantasised Orient bounced back to Europe, in particular through the works of artists who painted what they had seen, or thought they had seen. The Orientalist movement was buttressed by Napoleonic expeditions in Egypt or the travel boom (Eugene Delacroix in Morocco). And yet suffice it to say that only the elite had access to these visual representations, either by becoming owners of paintings or by admiring them in art galleries, the prerogative of the educated and the wealthy. It is against this context that the article will consider how ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture’ (and particularly postcards) permeated Victorian and Edwardian society, and through the transformative power of the Arts, contributed eminently to the consolidation of the imperial project.

The Middle East in American Media: A 21st Century Overview

Abstract: This study chronicles the portrayal of the Middle East in various American media that have received scholarly attention, centering on the print and broadcast media. The time frame of the media review in the United States towards the Middle East is from the September 11 th attacks in 2001 until 2019. The article draws on the theory of orientalism to reveal a facet of the media that perpetuates false stereotypes of the Middle East as a threat to US interests, culture, and security. It finds that although the media in America have paid detailed attention to many issues in the Middle East during the last two decades, there are grounds to assume it has failed to comprehend the sociopolitical and economic reasons behind such issues. Coverage of the Middle East in American media during the 21 st century has paralleled the government's official viewpoints and interests in the region.

“A Higher and Purer Shape”: Kaufmann Kohler's Jewish Orientalism and the Construction of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract: This article uses the case of Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926), an intellectual and institutional leader of American Reform Judaism, to explore the relationship between Orientalism and the category of religion in nineteenth-century America. Recent scholarship has shown that the lived religion of nineteenth-century American Jews departs significantly from the ideological hopes of Jewish elites. Connecting the emerging portrait of nineteenth-century Jewish laity with elite arguments for American Judaism, I reconsider Kohler's thought as a theological project out of step with his socioreligious milieu. Kohler is renowned for his theorizing of Judaism as a universal, ethical religion. As scholars have demonstrated repeatedly, defining Judaism as a “religion” was an important feature of Reform thought. What these accounts have insufficiently theorized, however, is the political context that ties the categorization of religion to the history of Orientalism that organized so many late nineteenth-century discussions of religion, Jewish and not. Drawing on work by Tracy Fessenden, John Modern, and Tisa Wenger, I show that Kohler's universal, cosmopolitan religion is a Jewish version of the Protestant secular. Like these Protestant modernists, Kohler defines Reform Judaism as a religion that supersedes an atavistic tribalism bound to materiality and ritual law. Being Jewish, for Kohler, means being civilized; reforming the soul of Judaism goes together with civilizing Jewish bodies and creating a Judaism that could civilize the world in an era in which religion and imperialism were overlapping interpretive projects with racial and gendered entanglements.

Discovering the Colonial Discourse in Lawrence in/of Arabia: A Postcolonial Reading

Abstract: Middle Easterners and Arabs are frequently depicted as backward, inferior, and primitive in Western literature and media. One of the works which focuses on the lives of the Arabs is the novel Lawrence in Arabia (2013) by Scott Anderson. Although the author has spent some time in the region that he has depicted, his descriptions consist of stereotypical generalizations about the Arabs. Hence, this study tries to investigate the partial intentions of the author throughout his novel. Moreover, the influences of media and Western sources about the Arabs' lives in his work are traced. To support its claims, the thesis sheds light on the discourse of the novel with the help of Foucault's definition of “Discourse”, Said's “Orientalism”, and Bhabha's “Stereotype”. These concepts help this study display how the novel presents the Arabs as exploited, marginalized, inferior, and in need of control in every aspect of their lives (i.e. cultural, social, economic, and political). Also, it is discussed how the author, as a colonizer, stereotypes the colonized in his text. In addition, the study tries to find the same trend in Lean’s movie, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and show how it influences Anderson’s view on representing the Arabs. Consequently, the findings prove that Anderson is influenced by the Western sources in his writing and media has a significant role in transferring a degrading picture of the Arab to its audience. Keywords: Discourse, Orientalism, Other, Middle East, Stereotype, Postcolonialism, Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia (2013), David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). DOI : 10.7176/JEP/10-15-10 Publication date :May 31 st 2019

Tutmania: An Exploration of Western Portrayals of King Tutankhamun and Orientalism in Egypt

Abstract: Since his discovery on November 4, 1922, King Tutankhamun has been turned into a symbol of ancient Egyptian culture by the Western world. Through Orientalist representation, the West has ensconced Tutankhamun into their own visualization of ancient Egypt that is removed from most historical realism. He has become a symbol for a distant and exotified past, which further contributes to the romanticization of ancient Egypt by the West. Tutankhamun has had a profound influence on numerous Western cultural outlets including art, fashion, architecture, film, music, and much more. This is because Tutankhamun, or at least his Western portrayal, has captivated the imagination of the Occident. He has come to embody an idealized past filled with mystery, curses, and treasure. The Western world has turned Tutankhamun into a marketing tool using sensationalism and Oriental tropes of Egypt. This paper will explore the ways in which this has happened since his discovery, as well as discuss the role that Howard Carter had in all of it. Tutankhamun’s discovery happened right after Egypt achieved independence from Britain, and for the first time a former colony got to keep every artifact of a European archaeological find.

The Homeland of Stereotypes

Abstract: Following the vigorous critique of orientalism, orientalist discourse has employed complex strategies to create ambivalent non- Western stereotypes. The earlier fixed oriental characters are often discarded; they are instead accorded certain amounts of flexibility. However, the fact is that despite such changes and these less negative images, orientalist discourse produces the Oriental other to effectively perpetuate Western domination. In fact, it simply draws upon old repertoire of stereotypes, recycles them and produces new ones; only care is taken that they do not sound as markedly negative as the old ones. The present paper seeks to investigate how the American TV series Homeland (2011) repeats the imperialist claims of the orientalist discourse by presenting a range of oriental character types, from the classic Muslim terrorist to some less negative characters. “Negative formulas” produce more ambivalent stereotypes to reinforce the alleged essential superiority of America. The series stages the character of the captive mind as the ideal oriental type to be imitated by all Orientals. The paper also demonstrates that how Homeland employs the orientalist theme of nativization, again only to prove the eventual unscontaminability and superiority of the West. Islam and Iran are the particular targets of Homeland’s stereotyping.

Trading Butterflies: The Representation of Asian Sex Workers in Vollmann and Houellebecq

Abstract: The article compares the representation of Asian sex workers in William T. Vollmann’s Butterfly Stories (1993) and Michel Houellebecq’s Platform ( Plateforme , 2001). Both the novels are set in South-East Asia, and both involve an apologetic and romanticised description of the sex trade. By comparing the two novels, I argue that both authors’ treatments of the sex industry develop a critique of Western Orientalism, and at the same time sympathy for and complicity with the colonial power dynamics that regulate the relationships between Asian countries and the West.

Resisting orientalism : Gramsci and Foucault in Counterpoint

Abstract: Edward Said’s Orientalism is one of the founding texts of postcolonial studies. Even though Said explicitly engages with the ideas of Gramsci, the book’s conceptualisation of power has predominantly been seen as Foucauldian. This one-sided, Foucauldian interpretation sparked many critiques in which Said was criticised for conceptualising power as all-pervasive, lacking a theory of resistance, and thereby trapped within the very Orientalist framework he intended to dissolve. To unravel this paradox, I propose to undertake a contrapuntal reading that places Orientalism in a combined Foucauldian and Gramscian light. I analyse how the incorporation and interplay of both these intertexts informs and structures Said’s approach. Conceptualising Orientalism as a discourse and as the product of hegemony in counterpoint allows one better to understand Said’s conceptualisation of power and reevaluates the possibilities for resistance by emphasising the agency of intellectuals.

Mea Culpa: re-reading nineteenth-century colonial-era works on South East Asia as confessional texts

Abstract: That nineteenth-century colonial-era writings have been rightly criticized for their Orientalist bias is no longer a new idea, thanks to the work done by scholars like Edward Said. But they leave u...

Re-Orienting Gender and Islamic Alterity in Early Modern English Drama

Abstract: Early modern scholars often read the dramatic representations of the Muslim woman in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which is largely informed by Said’s theory of Orientalism. However,...

Imagining modernity: the language and genealogy of modernity in nineteenth-century Arabic

Abstract: This article employs the methodology of conceptual history to contest two of the most common theoretical approaches dominating our understanding of modernity in the field of Middle Eastern studies....

Exploring the Representation of Feminist Reinventions, Cultural Alienation and Western Ideological Pressures on Muslim Women in Fadia Faqir’s my name is Salma

Abstract: This research explores the socio-cultural issues, identity formation and ideological pressures presented in the writings of exiled writer Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma. There is a vibrant evidence of cultural diasporic predicament and alienation with the postcolonial perspective. Protagonist of this novel tries to know her identity at a new place and struggles to gain a new multicultural identity. This research sets out to examine how identity is formed by a Muslim subject in a postcolonial Western context. Edward Said’s Orientalism, provides a solid stage to know about the west’s patronizing and fictional depictions of the East. Theories of hybridity, liminal space, mimicry and ambivalence presented by Homi K. Bhabha also provide a major ground to analyze the selected text. Issues related to Islamic ideology, new culture and the attitude of the new society in the modern era have also been brought under discussion and analysis. This research not only provides a basic knowledge about the culture and norms of Middle East but also about Islamic ideology and Islamic practices; it also provides an account off information about the pressures and ideology clashes on the basic of East and West. The research concludes that a Muslim character living in the West will form for themselves a hybrid identity that encompasses both their Muslim heritage and that of the modern, secular culture of the West.

Criticism to Edward W. Said’s Orientalism

Abstract: Edward W. Said’in Oryantalizm adli kitabinin yayinlanmasi ile Bati emperyalizminin Orta Dogu’ nun, Bati’daki temsiline ve tarihsel yazilimina onemli bir elestirel mudahalede bulunmustur. Pek cogu Oryantalizm i “yirminci yuzyilin son ceyreginde Ingilizcede yayimlanan en etkili akademik kitaplardan biri olarak kabul etmistir”(Lockman, 2004: 190). Eser, Batililarin bati'ya ozgu olmayan kulturler hakkinda yazdiklari ve temsillerini elestirerek, cesitli sekillerde carpik ve kucumseyici bakis acisi getirmeleri suclamasiyla akademik dunyada bir tartisma baslatmistir. Oryantalizm , sempati ve anlayis ile karsilanmakla beraber, ayni zamanda, uzun bir tutarsizliklar listesi de icerdiginden, tam bir reddedisi de beraberinde getirdi. Alexander Lyon Macfie, Oryantalizm (2002) adli eserinde bu durumu soyle aciklamaktadir: “Said’ in Oryantalizm adli eserinin gecerliligi o an icin karmasikti. Fakat alimlerin ve entellektuellerin milliyet ve dinlerinden bagimsiz olarak, bunlari etkileyen tarihi, modern ve post-modern (yapisal cozumleme, gercekligin aldatmacasi, entellektuel hegamonya, ve bunun gibi) felsefik fikirlerle ilgili olarak bir orneklem cesitliligine de rastlanmaktaydi”(109). Mevcut calisma Edward Said’ e ve etkileyici teorisine olan elestirileri, ve Said’ in bu elestirilere olan kismi cevaplarini sunmaktadir.

Egypt, Orientalism, and the BBC World Service, 1952–2013

Abstract: This article aims to supplement existing studies of the reception of the BBC in the Middle East by unpacking a genealogy of writers who heard one another’s talks. Beginning with Edward Said’s memor...