Modern Orientalism is not a brainchild of nineteenth-century European imperialists and colonialists, but, as Urs App demonstrates, was born in the eighteenth century after a very long gestation ...period defined less by economic or political motives than by religious ideology.
Based on sources from a dozen languages, many unavailable in English,The Birth of Orientalismpresents a completely new picture of this protracted genesis, its underlying dynamics, and the Western discovery of Asian religions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. App documents the immense influence of Japan and China and describes how the Near Eastern cradle of civilization moved toward mother India. Moreover, he shows that some of India's purportedly oldest texts were products of eighteenth-century European authors.
Though Western engagement with non-Abrahamic Asian religions reaches back to antiquity and can without exaggeration be called the largest-scale religiocultural encounter in history, it has so far received surprisingly little attention-which is why some of its major features and their role in the birth of modern Orientalism are described here for the first time. The study of Asian documents had a profound impact on Europe's intellectual makeup. Suddenly the Bible had much older competitors from China and India, Sanskrit threatened to replace Hebrew as the world's oldest language, and Judeo-Christianity appeared as a local phenomenon on a dramatically expanded, worldwide canvas of religions and mythologies. Orientalists were called upon as arbiters in a clash that involved neither gold and spices nor colonialism and imperialism but, rather, such fundamental questions as where we come from and who we are: questions of identity that demanded new answers as biblical authority dramatically waned.
Editorial: Spain and Orientalism McSweeney, Anna; Hopkins, Claudia
Art in translation,
20/1/2/, Letnik:
9, Številka:
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Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This special issue of Art in Translation is the outcome of the panel “Orientalism and Spain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in ...April 2016 at the University of Edinburgh, UK. The papers selected for publication in this issue represent fresh research into diverse visual responses to Spain’s heritage of its Islamic past (711–1492 CE) and her nearest “Orient” across the straits of Gibraltar: Morocco. The time span ranges from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, reflecting a period in which the monumental heritage of al-Andalus established itself as a major tourist attraction and, at the same time, shaped internal debates about Spain’s national identity and colonial rhetoric vis-à-vis Morocco.
En arquitectura, la crítica y teórica argentina Marina Waisman fue pionera en apuntar a la necesidad que, como latinoamericanxs, tenemos de desarrollar nuestros propios instrumentos para entender y ...cuestionar nuestra obra y pensamiento regionales. En la costa este norteamericana, la red Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) del Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ha ampliado el alcance geográfico de las reflexiones sobre la historia arquitectónica, y gracias a su apoyo financiero, contribuyó a la creación de material pedagógico que discute y promueve la construcción de la historia de la arquitectura con una mirada global. En 2016, ambos reorganizaron la colección principal del Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba), reconocido por su poderosa colección de arte moderno regional, a través de las nuevas categorías curatoriales que animaron la exposición temporal Verboamérica. Así, los curadores barajaron de nuevo una colección que antes estaba organizada bajo categorías europeas como impresionismo, cubismo, abstraccionismo, op-art, etc.
In The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan, Ayelet Zohar addresses issues of Orientalism, colonialism, and exoticism in modern Japan, through images of camels - the epitome of Otherness, and a ...metonymy for Asia in the Japanese imagination.
Este artículo intenta exponer algunos de los mecanismos de apropiación de las voces de las autoras anglófonas racializadas en el mercado cultural globalizado del que forman parte importantes ...editoriales, crítica y universidades. Estos mecanismos desvelan un pertinaz orientalismo en occidente en la aproximación a las "otras" culturas: la categorización crítica de los textos en guetos separados del canon principal (literatura "étnica", literatura "de minorías"); la lectura primordialmente etnográfica de textos auto/biográficos; la reiteración de temáticas de victimización, situadas en contextos lejanos en tiempo o espacio; o el deleite fetichista en los elementos paratextuales que envuelven al texto, con especial atención a la cosificación simbólica del cuerpo de las mujeres asiáticas.
This thesis evaluates the Near Eastern travels of the Victorian artist, Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) and their subsequent influences on his work. The project explores the numerous trips ...Leighton made throughout his career across parts of the Islamic world, most significantly the Ottoman Empire, and adds a new perspective to Leighton scholarship by examining the condition of his mobility across these territories and the production of images in the wake of his travelling. While previous scholarship has established Leighton as a cosmopolitan figure, my research demonstrates that the scope of his internationalism extends beyond European centres of artistic production and reveals the significance of his influential Orientalist networks. My analysis attends to the theoretical commitments of post-Saidean Orientalist studies, which seeks to de-centre European imperial narratives by exploring Western figures within the context of Eastern empires. Leighton’s paintings and drawings inspired by the region, and extensive collection of Ottoman and Syrian decorative art objects, represent an unprecedented interest by a leading British artist in Islamic material culture, challenging our understanding of a different British Orientalism and Aestheticism as largely focused on Japonisme and Chinoiserie. The thesis focuses upon four case studies to reveal the versatility of Leighton’s Orientalism. I argue for the centrality of Orientalism as a significant part of Leighton’s artistic production and explore the political stakes of such a position during his lifetime. In reflecting on these varied aspects of Leighton’s relationship with the Near East, the scholarship is significantly expanded to include considerations wider than his relationships to Classicism, the Renaissance, and modern art, but, importantly, how those genres interrelate with his Orientalism. While the thesis focuses on a single, canonical artist, it also demonstrates how British art history can move towards a more global position to study an expanded field of relations.
This research is a study of the notion of ambivalence within colonial and Orientalist contexts. Drawing on postcolonial and psychoanalytical theories, this thesis intends to examine the vacillation ...of the latter discourses between the poles of attraction and repulsion towards the colonised 'Other' and, more specifically, towards the Orient. This thesis posits that the concept of ambivalence is vital and indispensable in any discussion of Orientalist narratives and questions therefore Said's lack of engagement with it in his ground-breaking Orientalism. However, in contrast to many critical approaches to Said, this thesis argues for the existence of ambivalence not in order to refute or whittle down Said's text, but to validate and emphasise its central premises. Significantly, all major criticisms of Said's Orientalism have revolved around this pivotal issue of ambivalence. In addition to its employment by male critics to vindicate the colonising voice and attack Said's totalising and essentialist condemnation of it, ambivalence has been used also by female and feminist scholars to argue for the distinctiveness of women's approach to the Orient and admonish Said's neglect of the significance of gender. Another major reproach of Said's theory of Orientalism concerns its insufficient account of resistance or contradiction within the narratives of the colonised (or formerly colonised) intelligentsias. Through examining the fraught and complex idiosyncrasies of each group and highlighting the ubiquity of ambivalence in their Orientalist approaches, this thesis seeks eventually to verify Said's claims of the unity and totality of Orientalism. Moreover, the issue of ambivalence has been used ad nauseam to debunk or de-emphasise Said's central argument about the symbiotic relationship between power and knowledge. As this discussion intends to show, however, the validity of such a relationship cannot be contested on the basis of 'subversive' or 'sympathetic' accounts of Orientalists, since such accounts can often maintain their associations with discourses of power even in times of confusion and insecurity. One ultimate objective of this study of ambivalence is to discourage conventional and binaristic critical approaches that, either from a sheer desire for categorisation or an utter misunderstanding of Said's thesis, have tended to divide writers on the Orient into pro- and anti-imperialists. Orientalist narratives, as this thesis argues, are generally too conflicted to be neatly fitted into either the 'for' or 'against' column with regard to nineteenth-century British imperialism.
This thesis explores English literary engagement with the East Indies in the decades surrounding the foundation of the East India Company in 1600. It is well-established that the political and ...economic exchange between East and West facilitated England's development; this thesis contends that there was a critical, yet critically-neglected literary dimension to this Anglo-Asian relationship too. To date, there exists no study on how English writers, working across a variety of genres, engaged with South and Southeast Asia in this formative period. This thesis bridges this gap, contending that long before England acquired colonies in the East, England was already developing a metropolitan relationship with South and Southeast Asia, as writers shaped their imaginative visions of the East Indies in order to intervene in issues that mattered to England internally and internationally. By illustrating how a range of individuals were creatively invested in Asia, I complicate scholarly assumptions about the gender and class divisions that are believed to typify early modern cross-cultural encounters; by illuminating how authors did not view their Eastern tales as being exclusively about the East, I demonstrate the need to recalibrate the interpretive approaches to early modern Asian fictions that have gained currency following the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Each of the four chapters concentrates on a specific discursive phenomenon: Chapter One interrogates how late-Elizabethan writers archaised Asia, Chapter Two explores how Jacobean authors re-mapped the spiritual geography of Islamic Indonesia, Chapter Three interrogates how Henrietta Maria's court masques drew inspiration from India's Hindu culture and international commerce and Chapter Four traces how authors in the English Commonwealth perceived the prospect of an Eastern commercial empire. Taken together, these explorations of how Asia enabled English writers to negotiate issues regarding faith, trade and power extend our understanding of the pre-history of Orientalism and the 'Global Renaissance'.
Central Europe and the Non-European World in the Long 19th Century explores various ways in which inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy perceived and depicted the outside world during the era ...of European imperialism. Focusing particularly on the Czech Lands, Hungary, and Slovakia, with other nations as comparative examples, this collection shows how Central Europeans viewed other regions and their populations, from the Balkans and the Middle East to Africa, China, and America. Although the societies under Habsburg rule found themselves (with rare exceptions) outside the realm of colonialism, their inhabitants also engaged in colonial projects and benefited from these interactions. Rather than taking one “Central European” approach, the volume draws upon accounts not only by writers and travelers, but by painters, missionaries, and other observers, reflecting the diversity that characterized both the region itself and its views of non-Western cultures.
Este artículo analiza la pervivencia del imaginario orientalista en la literatura popular británica de la segunda mitad del siglo XX ambientada en España. Me centraré en dos novelas donde los ...elementos orientalistas proyectan la imagen de España como un país exótico, a la vez que menos evolucionado y anclado en el pasado. Además de ello, las autoras emplean la retórica del orientalismo para criticar el carácter prepotente y autoritario de los hombres españoles, herencia, según leemos, de la sangre mora que aún corre por sus venas. Estudiaré cómo este orientalismo feminista se impregna también de prejuicios esencialistas acerca del Otro.
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