Orientalism (Postcolonial Studies)

'Covering the “Arab Spring”: Oriental Revolutionaries in the mainstream Western Μedia',

by Alexander Kazamias

Mirage in the Desert, Ed. by Keeble, R. and Mair, J., London, Abramis, 2011, pp.44-51

This paper argues that Edward Said’s critique of the “Orientalist” bias of dominant Western representations of Arab... more This paper argues that Edward Said’s critique of the “Orientalist” bias of dominant Western representations of Arab cultures is still highly relevant when examining the reporting of the recent uprisings

Tourism and self-Orientalism in Oman: a critical discourse analysis

by William Feighery

It is established in the literature that touristic images of the Orient  are grounded in Occidental authority and... more It is established in the literature that touristic images of the Orient  are grounded in Occidental authority and dominant global power relations. Scholars have suggested that indigenous image creators in the Middle East continue to read from an Occidental script, perpetuating oppositional perspectives of us and them, the familiar and the strange, the dynamic and the atrophied – fuelling the development of neo-Orientalist tourist sites/sights. This paper explores the extent to which such scripting continues to persist in official representations of rentier states in the Arabian Peninsula. Through a critical discourse analysis of the Omani tourism promotional film Welcome to My Country, it is suggested that when Oman speaks for itself within a Western discourse of tourism promotion, what results is a form of self-Orientalism.

And You Can Be My Sheikh: Gender, Race, and Orientalism in Contemporary Romance Novels

by Jessica Taylor

Published in The Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 40, Issue 6, pages 1032–1051, December 2007

This paper examines popular category romances with sheikhs as heroes within the context of writing on Orientalism. I... more This paper examines popular category romances with sheikhs as heroes within the context of writing on Orientalism. I suggest that in category romances the conventions of Orientalism and those of the romance allow for a narrative of difference where a masculine, sexualized, Oriental Other and a feminine, western, desiring Subject meet, struggle, and resolve in an amalgam of Other and Self. This paper considers this narrative in the context of the place of the white Anglo Woman in the expansion of the American empire and the larger discourses of masculinity and femininity, race and ethnicity. I argue that sheikh romances create an imaginary eastern landscape which can be captured through detailed knowledge and which is open to the white woman's gaze. They create an Orient with harems empty of women, where anxieties about gender relations in the West can play out in a geographically separate terrain. The sheikhs in these romances are liminal figures: dark and desirable, but not too dark; masculine and powerful, yet willing to surrender to love; rooted in their “eastern” place, yet international. These sheikhs represent the Orient as desirable, but also desiring a union with the West in the form of a woman, representing the possibility of the Orient's incorporation into an expanding American cultural empire.

Postcoloniality, Orientalism, and the Question of Québec

by Matthew Chung

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Dalhousie Undergraduate Arts and Social Science Conference (Halifax, 2012)

Published in Canadian Content: The McGill Undergraduate Journal of Canadian Studies

Examines the ways in which postcolonial theory may inform a fundamental re-reading of some of the major primary... more Examines the ways in which postcolonial theory may inform a fundamental re-reading of some of the major primary sources in the field of Canadian history

Tracing a Thread of Orientalism through Colonialism & Beyond: Presentations of Vietnamese Nationalism by and for Americans

by Nolan Bensen

This paper traces the outlandish and essentializing claims of Neil Jamieson in Understanding Vietnam through his... more This paper traces the outlandish and essentializing claims of Neil Jamieson in Understanding Vietnam through his sources to the orientalist, adventurer, and son of a French colonial administrator in Vietnam, Paul Mus. It attempts to show that Mus' work was orientalist and that some major works citing him have been encouraged by his work to take that tack.

Ignore the last two pages. They were a minor assignment we had to turn in at the same time.

"Tintin in the Arab World and Arabic in the World of Tintin." Alternative Francophone 1.5 (2012): 26-39.

by Ziad Bentahar

Housing the Foreign. A European's Exotic Home in Late 19th-Century Beirut

by Ralph Bodenstein

in: Thomas Philipp, Jens Hanssen, Stefan Weber (eds.): The Empire in the City. Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, (Beiruter Texte und Studien; 88), Beirut: OIB & Würzburg: Ergon 2002, S. 105-127.

Paul Gauguin’s two Tahitian manifest paintings: Mana'o tupapa'u and Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

by Srdjan Tunic

In Serbian (Dva tahićanska manifesta Pola Gogena: Mana'o tupapa'u i Odakle dolazimo? Ko smo? Gde idemo?).

Key words: Paul Gauguin, Tahiti, symbolism, egzoticism, colonialism, orientalism, primitivism, feminism, gender studies

Summary:

Gauguin’s attitudes towards Tahiti and its indigenious population, colonialism and women – all the... more Summary:

Gauguin’s attitudes towards Tahiti and its indigenious population, colonialism and women – all the elements that are encoded in his work – were often contradictory and ambiguous. From his representation of Tahiti, one could encounter symbolistic utopias, personal vision and artistic project, contact with indigenious history and beliefs, the becoming of „noble savage“, sexual freedom and a lifequest for carefree life. Paintings Mana'o tupapa'u (The spirit watches over her, 1892) and Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897-98) could both be understood as manifests of his art inspired by and produced on Tahiti, relevant for the questions raised above. Also, a deeper insight was achieved by using postcolonial and gender theories, as well as analysis of egzoticism and primitivism in the modernist art.

Rendered Subjection: Representations of the neo-Oriental in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

by James C. Vlisides

Beginning in late October 2003, and spanning a series of 8 games and counting, the Call of Duty franchise has... more Beginning in late October 2003, and spanning a series of 8 games and counting, the Call of Duty franchise has established a reputation as the premier First-Person Shooter (FPS) on both PC and console platforms. Traversing a history from WWII to the modern "War on Terror," the Call of Duty franchise highlights significant global conflict from a vantage point of the exceptional American combatant. The franchise recently released Modern Warfare 3 (MW3) in November 2011, selling over 6.5 million copies on launch day and grossed $400 million in the U.S. alone in its first 24 hours. Modern Warfare 3 went on to gross $1 billion throughout the world in just 16 days of availability, making it the biggest entertainment launch of all time. Thus, Modern Warfare 3 represents a potent example of global military-entertainment consumption, and certainly seems to have more to say about the current economic, political, and international relations between nations and states. Through a close reading of MW3 as a text, I will explore questions including: How does MW3 represent the embodied “Other”? How are terrorist bodies corporealized in virtual spaces? How are these bodies rendered both visible and invisible? What spaces does the game privilege? Who has access to this structure of power? With these questions framing my research, I will look into the virtual geography that frames the logic of the game itself. I will engage various texts including The International Journal of Computer Game Research, Roger Stahl's book Militainment, Inc: War, Media, and Popular Culture, and Marcel O'Gorman's book Angels in Digital Armor: Technoculture and Terror Management, among many others. Through these texts I will begin to explore the intersections of technology, culture, the military, cultural economy, and border studies. Further, I will maintain a specific sensitivity to "neo-Orientalism," as the Middle-East has arguably been the primary focus of American economic and military interests since the end of the Cold War. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine how MW3 (re-)constructs the East, the Oriental, and the terrorist within its virtual game space, as well as the spatiality between reality and “virtuality,” and what this has to say about the current social, political, and economic agendas surrounding global conflict.


Keywords: American Empire, Orientalism, US Imperialism, Globalization, War-on-Terror, Bodies, Virtual Reality

Said, la conoscenza, l'alterità

by Cristiana Facchini

'We'll Wear Out Great Ones': Maria Pickersgill, Letitia Landon and the Power of the 'Improvisatrice'

by David Moberly

Romantic Textualities, 20 (Winter 2011): 7-23.

Maria Pickersgill, whose largest work, Tales of the Harem, was published in 1827, was the wife of Henry William... more Maria Pickersgill, whose largest work, Tales of the Harem, was published in 1827, was the wife of Henry William Pickergill, the most prominent London portrait artist of his day. Maria's well-connected husband and their London home provided her with several contacts who aided her in her desire to publish. Her first poetic work, “The Oriental Nosegay,” was printed in 1825 as part of a collection of poems in Letitia Landon's The Troubadours. Maria's husband had completed Landon's portrait after several long sittings in 1822 or 1823, at which time Maria likely met Landon and showed her some of her work, which Landon later published. Thereafter, Landon seems to have heavily influenced her work. Landon's poetry, in fact, is Maria's works'closest analogue. Maria embraces Landon’s depiction of the woman poetess’ role as that of an “improvisatrice,” whose poetry flows spontaneously out of emotion in something more like performance than poetry (if one strictly follows Wordsworth’s definition of the term). Maria uses the performances of harem women in Tales of the Harem as a metaphor for the way in which women’s poetry can subvert and “wear out” the patriarchal powers that be. As such, this interdisciplinary paper offers a detailed view of the way in which one London woman negotiated her poetry into publication, and what that negotiation reveals about her poetic style and the place she carved for herself in the London art world.

Review of Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze

by Su-kyoung Hwang

Influence of the history of archaeological thought in South Asia on the understanding of ancient states and empires, including the prevalence of Colonial and Orientalist modes of interpretation.

by Seetal Gahir

Reseña de / Review of Dakhlia, Jocelyne, 'Lingua franca. Histoire d'une langue métisse en Méditerranée', Arles: Actes Sud, 2008.

by Salvador Peña

Published in 'Al-Qantara' 30 (2009), pp. 659-664.

War and State in the Northeastern Black Sea Region: The Impact of Russian-Ottoman Rivalry on Processes of Political Modernization (19th century)

by Irma Kreiten

Catalogue Note on Taner Ceylan's Cage of Flesh (2012)

by Cüneyt Çakırlar

Co-authored with Serkan Delice, published in Contemporary Art / Turkish (exhibition catalogue). Sotheby's, London: London, UK.

Cage of Flesh (Ten Kafesi), the most recent piece by the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan, engages with the politics... more Cage of Flesh (Ten Kafesi), the most recent piece by the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan, engages with the politics of and the erotics within representation in Orientalist painting by confronting the viewer with a re-imagined figure of an odalisque. Following his highly acclaimed Lost Painting Series that featured Fake World (2011), 1640 (2011), 1879 (2011), 1923 (2010) and 1881 (2010), Cage of Flesh uses an ingenious amalgam of allusions to both Orientalist eroticisation of female flesh and the Sufi tradition of imagining the flesh as a cage of worldly desires. Referring to the infatuation of the Orientalist male gaze with Oriental female carnality, Ceylan envisages the flesh as a cage in which the odalisque is incarcerated. The reduction of "Oriental" woman to a silenced, oppressed and submissive body codified as beautiful, smooth and sensual flesh to invite and satisfy the Western male gaze deprives the odalisque of her individuality and renders her flesh a cage in which she is merely a body that cannot speak its name.

TartariaMag_issue1-2012

by Nikolay Tsyrempilov

La desaparición de Oriente: Edward W. Said y sus detractores

by Salvador Peña

Published in 'Mirada a Oriente', edited by Luis Gago, Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 2008, pp. 109-129.

Islamophobia in the British Tabloids

by Nadeem Fayaz

This essay attempts to contribute to the extensive amount of research on the representation of Muslims in the media.... more This essay attempts to contribute to the extensive amount of research on the representation of Muslims in the media. This paper, however, focuses more specifically on the representation of Muslims in British tabloid newspapers. Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism is the foundation from which this essay is built around with the intention of showing how Orientalist commentary finds its way into the tabloid newspaper representations of Muslims. This paper finds evidence of a growing trend of stories that target Muslims in articles about immigration thereby positioning British Muslims as a particular problem section of the population. ‘British values’ are consistently pitted against ‘Muslim values’ in these articles in the classic Orientalist standpoint that creates a false binary of the two supposedly homogenous values. In the analysis of these texts, John E. Richardson’s ‘ideological square’ is applied in order to show the positive ‘self’ presentations alongside the negative ‘other’ presentations. The tendency to portray domestic violence when involving Muslim men as a conflict of culture is also drawn upon. The essay also points to the tendency to portray Muslims as a homogeneous mass and often with unrepresentative individuals who fit into the ‘fanatical’ stereotype made ready for them. This is coupled with the marginalization of more ‘moderate’ Muslim voices thereby portraying a particular image of Islam and Muslims.

Orientalism and Millenarian Dialectics in Walt Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’ and Gary Snyder’s Earth House Hold

by Hannes Bergthaller

In >Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry<. Eds. Christian Klöckner und Sabine Sielke. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. 275-297.