Debating Orientalism

Debating Orientalism
Author: Anna Bernard
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2013-06-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137341114

Edward Said continues to fascinate and stir controversy, nowhere more than with his classic work Orientalism. Debating Orientalism brings a rare mix of perspectives to an ongoing polemic. Contributors from a range of disciplines take stock of the book's impact and appraise its significance in contemporary cultural politics and philosophy.

Debating Orientalism

Debating Orientalism
Author: Anna Bernard
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2013-06-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137341114

Edward Said continues to fascinate and stir controversy, nowhere more than with his classic work Orientalism. Debating Orientalism brings a rare mix of perspectives to an ongoing polemic. Contributors from a range of disciplines take stock of the book's impact and appraise its significance in contemporary cultural politics and philosophy.

Orientalism

Orientalism
Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2014-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804153868

A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.

Orientalism

Orientalism
Author: John M. MacKenzie
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 1995-07-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780719045783

The Orientalism debate, inspired by the work of Edward Said, has been a major source of cross-disciplinary controversy. This work offers a re-evaluation of this vast literature of Orientalism by a historian of imperalism, giving it a historical perspective

Orientalism and the Jews

Orientalism and the Jews
Author: Ivan Davidson Kalmar
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781584654117

A fascinating analysis of how Jews fit into scholarly debates about Orientalism.

Orientalism

Orientalism
Author: Alexander Lyon Macfie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317875338

At a crucial moment in the history of relations of East and West, Orient and Occident, Christianity and Islam, Orientalism provides a timely account of the subject and the debate. In the 1960s and 1970s a powerful assault was launched on 'orientalism', led by Edward Said. The debate ranged far beyond the traditional limits of 'dry-as-dust' orientalism, involving questions concerning the nature of identity, the nature of imperialism, Islamophobia, myth, Arabism, racialism, intercultural relations and feminism. Charting the history of the vigorous debate about the nature of orientalism, this timely account revisits the arguments and surveys the case studies inspired by that debate.

After Orientalism

After Orientalism
Author: François Pouillion
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2014-11-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 900428253X

The debate on Orientalism began some fifty years ago in the wake of decolonization. While initially considered a turning point, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was in fact part of a larger academic endeavor – the political critique of “colonial science” – that had already significantly impacted the humanities and social sciences. In a recent attempt to broaden the debate, the papers collected in this volume, offered at various seminars and an international symposium held in Paris in 2010-2011, critically examine whether Orientalism, as knowledge and as creative expression, was in fact fundamentally subservient to Western domination. By raising new issues, the papers shift the focus from the center to the peripheries, thus analyzing the impact on local societies of a major intellectual and institutional movement that necessarily changed not only their world, but the ways in which they represented their world. World history, which assumes a plurality of perspectives, leads us to observe that the Saidian critique applies to powers other than Western European ones — three case studies are considered here: the Ottoman, Russian (and Soviet), and Chinese empires. Other essays in this volume proceed to analyze how post-independence states have made use of the tremendous accumulation of knowledge and representations inherited from previous colonial regimes for the sake of national identity, as well as how scholars change and adapt what was once a hegemonic discourse for their own purposes. What emerges is a new landscape in which to situate research on non-Western cultures and societies, and a road-map leading readers beyond the restrictive dichotomy of a confrontation between West and East. With contributions by: Elisabeth Allès; Léon Buskens; Stéphane A. Dudoignon; Baudouin Dupret; Edhem Eldem; Olivier Herrenschmidt; Nicholas S. Hopkins; Robert Irwin; Mouldi Lahmar; Sylvette Larzul; Jean-Gabriel Leturcq; Jessica Marglin; Claire Nicholas; Emmanuelle Perrin; Alain de Pommereau; François Pouillon; Zakaria Rhani; Emmanuel Szurek; Jean-Claude Vatin; Mercedes Volait

Defending the West

Defending the West
Author: Ibn Warraq
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2010-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 161592020X

This is the first systematic critique of Edward Said's influential work, Orientalism, a book that for almost three decades has received wide acclaim, voluminous commentary, and translation into more than fifteen languages. Said's main thesis was that the Western image of the East was heavily biased by colonialist attitudes, racism, and more than two centuries of political exploitation. Although Said's critique was controversial, the impact of his ideas has been a pervasive rethinking of Western perceptions of Eastern cultures, plus a tendency to view all scholarship in Oriental Studies as tainted by considerations of power and prejudice. In this thorough reconsideration of Said's famous work, Ibn Warraq argues that Said's case against the West is seriously flawed. Warraq accuses Said of not only willfully misinterpreting the work of many scholars, but also of systematically misrepresenting Western civilization as a whole. With example after example, he shows that ever since the Greeks Western civilization has always had a strand in its very makeup that has accepted non-Westerners with open arms and has ever been open to foreign ideas. The author also criticizes Said for inadequate methodology, incoherent arguments, and a faulty historical understanding. He points out, not only Said's tendentious interpretations, but historical howlers that would make a sophomore blush. Warraq further looks at the destructive influence of Said's study on the history of Western painting, especially of the 19th century, and shows how, once again, the epigones of Said have succeeded in relegating thousands of first-class paintings to the lofts and storage rooms of major museums. An extended appendix reconsiders the value of 18th- and 19th-century Orientalist scholars and artists, whose work fell into disrepute as a result of Said's work.

Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination

Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination
Author: Yaron Peleg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501729357

Calling into question prevailing notions about Orientalism, Yaron Peleg shows how the paradoxical mixture of exoticism and familiarity with which Jews related to Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century shaped the legacy of Zionism. In Peleg's view, the tension between romancing the East and colonizing it inspired a revolutionary reform that radically changed Jewish thought during the Hebrew Revival that took place between 1900 and 1930. Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination introduces a fresh voice to the contentious debate over the concept of Orientalism. Zionism has often been labeled a Western colonial movement that sought to displace and silence Palestinian Arabs. Based on his readings of key texts, Peleg asserts that early Zionists were inspired by Palestinian Arab culture, which in turn helped mold modern Jewish gender, identity, and culture. Peleg begins with the new ways in which the lands of the Bible are formulated as a modern "Orient" in David Frishman's Bamidbar. He continues by showing how in The Sons of Arabia, Moshe Smilansky laid the basis for the literary construction of the "New Jew," modeled after Palestinian Arabs. Peleg concludes with a discussion of L. A. Arielli's 1913 play Allah Karim! in which both the promise and the problems of the Land of Israel as "Orient" marked the end of Hebrew Orientalism as a viable cultural option.

Legal Orientalism

Legal Orientalism
Author: Teemu Ruskola
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2013-06-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674075781

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.