First published in 1998, this volume reflects that, ever since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism twenty years ago, scholars have tested his thesis against the wider application of his terms to cultural practices and the rhetoric of power. The cultural impact of the British on their colonies has been extensively investigated but only recently have scholars begun to ask in what ways British culture was transformed by its contact with the colonies. The essays in this volume demonstrate how influential the Empire was on British culture from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. They show how, from cross-cultural cross-dressing to Buddhism, British artists and writers appropriated unfamiliar and challenging aspects of the culture of the Empire for their own purposes. An examination is also made of the extent to which colonized people engaged in the orientalising discourse, amending and subverting it, even re-applying its stereotypes to the British themselves. Finally, two essays explore instances of the exchange of ideas between colonies. Several of the essays are based on papers given at the 1996 Conference of the College Arts Association.

Introduction : mapping orientalism : representations and pedagogies / Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass -- Interrogating orientalism : theories and practices / Jeffrey Cass -- The female captivity narrative : blood, water, and orientalism / Diane Long Hoeveler -- "Better than the reality" : the Egyptian market in nineteenth-century travel writing / Emily A. Haddad -- Colonial counterflow : from orientalism to Buddhism / Mark Lussier -- Homoerotics and orientalism in William Beckford's Vathek: liberalism and the problem of pederasty / Jeffrey Cass -- Orientalism in Disraeli's Alroy / Sheila A. Spector -- Teaching the quintessential Turkish tale : Montagu's Turkish embassy letters / Jeanne Dubino -- Representing India in drawing-room and classroom : or, Miss Owenson and "those gay gentlemen, Brahma, Vishnu, and Co." / Michael J. Franklin -- "Unlettered tartars" and "torpid barbarians" : teaching the figure of the Turk in Shelley and De Quincey / Filiz Turhan -- "Boundless thoughts and free souls" : teaching Byron's Sardanapalus, Lara, and The corsair / G. Todd Davis -- Byron's The giaour : teaching orientalism in the wake of September 11 / Alan Richardson -- Teaching nineteenth-century orientalist entertainments / Edward Ziter

Until now, Orientalist art—exemplified by paintings of harems, slave markets, or bazaars—has predominantly been understood to reflect Western interpretations and to perpetuate reductive, often demeaning stereotypes of the exotic East. Orientalism's Interlocutors contests the idea that Orientalist art simply expresses the politics of Western domination and argues instead that it was often produced through cross-cultural interactions. Focusing on paintings and other representations of North African and Ottoman cultures, by both local artists and westerners, the contributors contend that the stylistic similarities between indigenous and Western Orientalist art mask profound interpretive differences, which, on examination, can reveal a visual language of resistance to colonization. The essays also demonstrate how marginalized voices and viewpoints—especially women's—within Western Orientalism decentered and destabilized colonial authority. Looking at the political significance of cross-cultural encounters refracted through the visual languages of Orientalism, the contributors engage with pressing recent debates about indigenous agency, postcolonial identity, and gendered subjectivities. The very range of artists, styles, and forms discussed in this collection broadens contemporary understandings of Orientalist art. Among the artists considered are the Algerian painters Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim; Turkish painter Osman Hamdi; British landscape painter Barbara Bodichon; and the French painter Henri Regnault. From the liminal "Third Space" created by mosques in postcolonial Britain to the ways nineteenth-century harem women negotiated their portraits by British artists, the essays in this collection force a rethinking of the Orientalist canon. This innovative volume will appeal to those interested in art history, theories of gender, and postcolonial studies. Contributors. Jill Beaulieu, Roger Benjamin, Zeynep Çelik, Deborah Cherry, Hollis Clayson, Mark Crinson, Mary Roberts

The late Edward Said remains one of the most influential critics and public intellectuals of our time, with lasting contributions to many disciplines. Much of his reputation derives from the phenomenal multidisciplinary influence of his 1978 book Orientalism. Said's seminal polemic analyzes novels, travelogues, and academic texts to argue that a dominant discourse of West over East has warped virtually all past European and American representation of the Near East. But despite the book's wide acclaim, no systematic critical survey of the rhetoric in Said's representation of Orientalism and the resulting impact on intellectual culture has appeared until today. Drawing on the extensive discussion of Said's work in more than 600 bibliographic entries, Daniel Martin Varisco has written an ambitious intellectual history of the debates that Said's work has sparked in several disciplines, highlighting in particular its reception among Arab and European scholars. While pointing out Said's tendency to essentialize and privilege certain texts at the expense of those that do not comfortably it his theoretical framework, Varisco analyzes the extensive commentary the book has engendered in Oriental studies, literary and cultural studies, feminist scholarship, history, political science, and anthropology. He employs "critical satire" to parody the exaggerated and pedantic aspects of post-colonial discourse, including Said's profound underappreciation of the role of irony and reform in many of the texts he cites. The end result is a companion volume to Orientalism and the vast research it inspired. Rather than contribute to dueling essentialisms, Varisco provides a path to move beyond the binary of East versus West and the polemics of blame. Reading Orientalism is the most comprehensive survey of Said's writing and thinking to date. It will be of strong interest to scholars of Middle East studies, anthropology, history, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and literary studies.

In Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality in Global Cultures scholars look afresh at representations of nineteenth-century ?oriental? bodies, inquiring deeply into their erotic dimensions, tracing their global dissemination at cross-cultural intersections of the visual and the political. Authors consider the impact of eroticized orientalist representations registered on racial and gendered bodies at historical moments across the globe in the media of photography, painting, prints and sculpture by contextualizing the visual within social practices, ethnography, literature, travel writing and the dynamics of imperialism. Authors examine orientalism?s politico-erotic import across not only imperial Britain and France but also throughout India and the Middle East initiating cross-cultural analyses of orientalism outside of Europe. Works studied include Orientalist and homoerotic works by canonic artists such as Ingres, G?me, Delacroix and Girodet, and lesser-known artists such as sculptor Raffaele Monti and painter Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann. Contributors explore Turkish and European writings, explorer Richard Burton?s self-fashioning, and popular Orientalist photography in India and the Middle East. Authors draw on methods from gender studies, semiotics, material culture and psychoanalysis to explore art, national identity, homoerotic subcultures, female agency, class, sexuality and colonialism. The book is directed to interdisciplinary scholars and students in art history, literature, history, and postcolonial studies.

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.

In the period of decolonisation that followed the end of the Second World War a number of scholars, mainly Middle Eastern, launched a sustained assault on Orientalism - the theory and practice of representing 'the Orient' in Western thought -accusing its practitioners of misrepresentation, prejudice and bias. As a result an intense debate occurred regarding the validity of the charges made, involving not only Orientalists but students of history, anthropology, sociology, women's studies and the media. Orientalism: A Reader provides the student with a selection of key readings from this debate, covering a range of areas including myth, imperialism, the cultural perspective, Marxist interpretation and feminist attitudes.The origins and character of the debate on Orientalism are introduced, as well as the intellectual foundations of the assault made and the nature of the debate which ensued. Coverage begins with nineteenth-century material from thinkers such as Hegel and Marx, and moves through extracts from Nietzsche, Gramsci and Foucault to contemporary work from, for example, Bryan Turner, John MacKenzie and Edward Said. As well as a general introduction, each section is introduced and the extracts are placed in context to guide the student carefully through this complex debate.