The Concept Of Orientalism History Essay [Internet].
Finally, it is important to point out that even when successful, the programme of rejection of Eastern-Europeanness has come with a collective cost. The post-Cold War wish to align with the West directly translated into Eastern European willingness to become rule-takers from the West, which reflected their readiness for self-denial when their historical memory of e.g. World War II or recent experiences of colonialism did not align with Western norms of appropriateness (Broslma et al 2019: 15). Needing to counter Orientalist stereotypes of Easterners being immature, emotional, aggressive, backwards, nationalistic etc., Eastern Europeans could ill-afford expressions of views or behaviour that would be seen as reinforcing these exact stereotypes.
Memory and with it the historical past are effaced as in the common, dismissively contemptuous American phrase, "you're history." Twenty-five years after its publication, Orientalism once again raises the question of whether modem imperialism ever ended, or whether it has continued in the Orient since Napoleon's entry into Egypt two centuries ago.
policy two decades ago), were Iraq to have been the world's largest exporter of bananas or oranges, surely there would have been no war, no hysteria over mysteriously vanished weapons of mass destruction, no transporting of an enormous army, navy, and air force 7,000 miles away to destroy a country scarcely known even to the educated American, all in the name of "freedom." Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like "us" and didn't appreciate "our" values the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma as I describe its creation and circulation in this book there would have been no war.
Edward said theory of orientalism
We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?
While discussing Western Orientalism towards Eastern Europe, it is important to keep in mind that it is not just a straightforwardly Western preoccupation, and Eastern Europeans are not simply passive targets of essentialising attitudes from the outside. While negative stereotypes are obviously an important reputational disadvantage and can have a damaging effect on many areas of life from national security to attracting foreign investment, there are nevertheless opportunities for resistance, as well as chances of opportunistic weaponisation of the very same stereotypes against others.
Today, bookstores in the United States are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat, and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples over there who have been such a terrible thorn in "our" flesh.
The Scope of Orientalism
1. Knowing the Oriental
2. Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental
3. Projects
4. Crisis
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
1. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized Religion
2. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory
3. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination
4. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French
Orientalism Now
1. Latent and Manifest Orientalism
2. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism’s Worldliness
3. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower
4. The Latest Phase
Edward said theory of orientalism
241)? This pattern extends to the book’s aesthetics, from promotional materials in which SHARIA is rendered in capital red letters, to the orientalist postcard serving as its cover (the third major publication on Balkan Muslim history by Western authors in the span of five years to focus the reader’s gaze on women in full-body veils), all the way to images and captions in the body of the text.
Part I: Orientalism: The Development of a Discourse
Even the real-life experiences of Westerners who visited the East, seen through Orientalist prejudice, did probably more to perpetuate the negative stereotypes than contest them. An American historian of the First World War, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, has described the bewilderment felt by German soldiers when they encountered the ethnic, linguistic and religious complexity of Eastern European lands during their occupation by Imperial Germany. It became clear to them that they could no longer think of these lands as just ‘West Russia’, as they had before. Instead, these were territories that had changed hands time and time again through centuries, and ‘it seemed that once a thing happened, it stayed on forever, absorbed and retained, present in visible traces and echoed memories’ (Liulevicius 2004: 35-36).
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Orientalism's first page opens with a 1975 description of the Lebanese Civil War that ended in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of human blood continues up to this minute.
Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. London: Pantheon.
As a result, what generations of Bosnian scholars since Purivatra have rightly seen as equally important pillars of the JMO’s politics—namely the class interests of Muslim landowners, an insistence on preserving Bosnia-Herzegovina’s territorial integrity within the new Yugoslav state, and even concern for the autonomy of non-judicial communal institutions—fall almost entirely by the wayside.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
One particularly important historical process that impacted Western ideas about the East of Europe was the Early Modern rise of the Russian Empire as a Great Power and a major threat replacing that of the Ottoman Empire (Bracewell 2020: 94). From that point onwards, the eastern boundary of the West could be identified with the western border of Russia, a country that itself was a target of much Western Orientalist stereotypes. But the clarity thus created by Russia’s rise was hardly sufficient, as its borders kept changing over time and it kept adding new lands to its imperial possessions. Even after centuries, Russia’s more recently conquered westernmost borderlands retained a linguistic, cultural and religious distinctiveness compared to Russia proper, and subsequently became the northern reaches of what is understood as Eastern Europe today. The one exception is Finland, added to the Russian Empire only in 1809, which instead (re-)claimed for itself a Nordic identity in the years following its declaration of independence in 1917, and subsequently argued against attempts to brand it as ‘Baltic’ (Wunsch 2006).