Florin Turcanu and Nicolas Meylan
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195394337
- eISBN:
- 9780199777358
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195394337.003.0011
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This article discusses the place of southeast Europe in the crystallization of Mircea Eliade’s conception of the history of religions. Since the mid-1930s, Eliade regarded the Balkans as a region of ...
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This article discusses the place of southeast Europe in the crystallization of Mircea Eliade’s conception of the history of religions. Since the mid-1930s, Eliade regarded the Balkans as a region of exceptional folkloric and prehistoric survivals at the crossroads between the Orient and the Occident. Through his reflection about the privileged links between the history of religions and the folkloric sources seen as vehicles for myths, Eliade’s vision of the Balkans’ cultural uniqueness inspired his conception about the particularity of the study of religion, as well as his idea of the history of religions as a new kind of universal history.Less
This article discusses the place of southeast Europe in the crystallization of Mircea Eliade’s conception of the history of religions. Since the mid-1930s, Eliade regarded the Balkans as a region of exceptional folkloric and prehistoric survivals at the crossroads between the Orient and the Occident. Through his reflection about the privileged links between the history of religions and the folkloric sources seen as vehicles for myths, Eliade’s vision of the Balkans’ cultural uniqueness inspired his conception about the particularity of the study of religion, as well as his idea of the history of religions as a new kind of universal history.
Charles Issawi
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195118131
- eISBN:
- 9780199854554
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195118131.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
The book is concerned with the way how some of the major cultures of the world have perceived and interacted with each other in the course of the last 2,000 years. The author has been interested in ...
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The book is concerned with the way how some of the major cultures of the world have perceived and interacted with each other in the course of the last 2,000 years. The author has been interested in this subject for many years due to his family background (Westernized, Christian, Syrian, and multilingual), scholastic background (educated in foreign schools), and his service in the United Nations Secretariat in New York. The different chapters in the book reflect his thinking on the subject for the past fifteen to twenty years. This chapter further gives a short discussion on the ideas presented in each chapter of the book. The chapters looks at topics which range from a clash of cultures, the main language groups, views on foreign culture, the Ottoman Empire, Western Europe, world languages, and the West's perception of the Orient.Less
The book is concerned with the way how some of the major cultures of the world have perceived and interacted with each other in the course of the last 2,000 years. The author has been interested in this subject for many years due to his family background (Westernized, Christian, Syrian, and multilingual), scholastic background (educated in foreign schools), and his service in the United Nations Secretariat in New York. The different chapters in the book reflect his thinking on the subject for the past fifteen to twenty years. This chapter further gives a short discussion on the ideas presented in each chapter of the book. The chapters looks at topics which range from a clash of cultures, the main language groups, views on foreign culture, the Ottoman Empire, Western Europe, world languages, and the West's perception of the Orient.
Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199554157
- eISBN:
- 9780191720437
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199554157.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 18th-century Literature
Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a 14th-century ...
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Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a 14th-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation. Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period. Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts—and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism—this collection of chapters by noted scholars from “East,” “West,” and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous afterlife in the contemporary Arabic novel.Less
Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a 14th-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation. Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period. Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts—and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism—this collection of chapters by noted scholars from “East,” “West,” and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous afterlife in the contemporary Arabic novel.
Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199554157
- eISBN:
- 9780191720437
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199554157.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 18th-century Literature
Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Over a period of some ...
More
Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Over a period of some three hundred years following its 18th-century translation into French and English, a chain of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe. The development of Western literary forms was hugely influenced by the Arabian Nights though classical Arabic literary culture had, ironically, never held it in especially high esteem. The chapters trace the textual history and circulation of the Nights during and after the European Enlightenment to reveal the text's significant impact on literature, but also its fluctuating reception in relation to political tensions between “East” and “West.” Said's Orientalism remains central to these debates. With the emergence of the Arabic novel, many of the narrative techniques and themes which European and Latin American writers had derived from the Nights served as inspiration for a new generation of Arab novelists. In short, the Orient writes back in a register that both resembles and departs from its representations within and without.Less
Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Over a period of some three hundred years following its 18th-century translation into French and English, a chain of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe. The development of Western literary forms was hugely influenced by the Arabian Nights though classical Arabic literary culture had, ironically, never held it in especially high esteem. The chapters trace the textual history and circulation of the Nights during and after the European Enlightenment to reveal the text's significant impact on literature, but also its fluctuating reception in relation to political tensions between “East” and “West.” Said's Orientalism remains central to these debates. With the emergence of the Arabic novel, many of the narrative techniques and themes which European and Latin American writers had derived from the Nights served as inspiration for a new generation of Arab novelists. In short, the Orient writes back in a register that both resembles and departs from its representations within and without.
Khalid Bekkaoui
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199554157
- eISBN:
- 9780191720437
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199554157.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter draws parallels between the English nation's fascination with The Arabian Nights and the rise of particular generic paradigms. Taking examples from Penelope Aubin and other 18th-century ...
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This chapter draws parallels between the English nation's fascination with The Arabian Nights and the rise of particular generic paradigms. Taking examples from Penelope Aubin and other 18th-century writers, it analyzes stories about captive English heroines and travelers who, intensely attracted to Moorish heroes, chose to remain with their Muslim lovers rather then returning to their conventional life at home. The sensual and luxurious appeal of the Orient is displaced onto European women whose intense attraction to Moorish heroes becomes a familiar trope. The East paradoxically offers greater social class mobility for European women in their ascent from slave girl to favored queen. Female renegades, the chapter argues, serve as vulnerable receptors of Eastern eschatologies and as signs of the West's failure to persuade itself of European sexual, religious, and cultural superiority. Situated in a textual battling ground for Western ideology, these captives and defectors reveal how troubled Europe becomes as it imagines sacrificing its profligate women to an imagined alterity.Less
This chapter draws parallels between the English nation's fascination with The Arabian Nights and the rise of particular generic paradigms. Taking examples from Penelope Aubin and other 18th-century writers, it analyzes stories about captive English heroines and travelers who, intensely attracted to Moorish heroes, chose to remain with their Muslim lovers rather then returning to their conventional life at home. The sensual and luxurious appeal of the Orient is displaced onto European women whose intense attraction to Moorish heroes becomes a familiar trope. The East paradoxically offers greater social class mobility for European women in their ascent from slave girl to favored queen. Female renegades, the chapter argues, serve as vulnerable receptors of Eastern eschatologies and as signs of the West's failure to persuade itself of European sexual, religious, and cultural superiority. Situated in a textual battling ground for Western ideology, these captives and defectors reveal how troubled Europe becomes as it imagines sacrificing its profligate women to an imagined alterity.
Ros Ballaster
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199234295
- eISBN:
- 9780191696657
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234295.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 18th-century Literature
This book considers this concept: narrative moves. Stories migrate from one culture to another, over vast distances sometimes, but their path is often difficult to trace and obscured by time. This ...
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This book considers this concept: narrative moves. Stories migrate from one culture to another, over vast distances sometimes, but their path is often difficult to trace and obscured by time. This book looks at the traffic of narrative between Orient and Occident in the 18th century, and challenges the assumption that has dominated since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) that such traffic is always one-way. Eighteenth-century readers in the West came to draw their mental maps of oriental territories and distinctions between them from their experience of reading tales ‘from’ the Orient. In this proto-colonial period the English encounter with the East was largely mediated through the consumption of material goods such as silks, indigo, muslin, spices, or jewels, imported from the East, together with the more ‘moral’ traffic of narratives about the East, both imaginary and ethnographic. Through analyses of fictional representations (including travellers' accounts, letter narratives such as Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, and popular sequences of tales such as the Arabian Nights Entertainments) of four oriental territories (Persia, Turkey, China, and India), this book demonstrates the ways in which the East came to be understood as a source of story, a territory of fable and narrative.Less
This book considers this concept: narrative moves. Stories migrate from one culture to another, over vast distances sometimes, but their path is often difficult to trace and obscured by time. This book looks at the traffic of narrative between Orient and Occident in the 18th century, and challenges the assumption that has dominated since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) that such traffic is always one-way. Eighteenth-century readers in the West came to draw their mental maps of oriental territories and distinctions between them from their experience of reading tales ‘from’ the Orient. In this proto-colonial period the English encounter with the East was largely mediated through the consumption of material goods such as silks, indigo, muslin, spices, or jewels, imported from the East, together with the more ‘moral’ traffic of narratives about the East, both imaginary and ethnographic. Through analyses of fictional representations (including travellers' accounts, letter narratives such as Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, and popular sequences of tales such as the Arabian Nights Entertainments) of four oriental territories (Persia, Turkey, China, and India), this book demonstrates the ways in which the East came to be understood as a source of story, a territory of fable and narrative.
Dúnlaith Bird
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199644162
- eISBN:
- 9780199949984
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199644162.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Having considered the theorisation of performativity by Judith Butler and Mary Louise Pratt, this chapter uses theatrical performances both in the fictional writing of Colette and Rachilde and in the ...
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Having considered the theorisation of performativity by Judith Butler and Mary Louise Pratt, this chapter uses theatrical performances both in the fictional writing of Colette and Rachilde and in the travelogues of Isabelle Eberhardt to demonstrate how performance and performativity intertwine in the disorderly motion of vagabondage. The second section examines the Orient as a staging space for female movement, where a potent form of gender proxemics comes into play between the body of the woman travel writer and her Oriental subjects. The travelogue becomes a location of misfiring gender constructions, temporary contact zones and dramatic destruction. Finally, the chapter explores the disconcerting effects produced when textuality and the female body in motion collide in vagabondage travelogues.Less
Having considered the theorisation of performativity by Judith Butler and Mary Louise Pratt, this chapter uses theatrical performances both in the fictional writing of Colette and Rachilde and in the travelogues of Isabelle Eberhardt to demonstrate how performance and performativity intertwine in the disorderly motion of vagabondage. The second section examines the Orient as a staging space for female movement, where a potent form of gender proxemics comes into play between the body of the woman travel writer and her Oriental subjects. The travelogue becomes a location of misfiring gender constructions, temporary contact zones and dramatic destruction. Finally, the chapter explores the disconcerting effects produced when textuality and the female body in motion collide in vagabondage travelogues.
Ros Ballaster
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199234295
- eISBN:
- 9780191696657
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234295.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to look at what western readers who imagined themselves into the role of Dinarzade—an observer from the sidelines of the dynamics of an eastern ...
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This chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to look at what western readers who imagined themselves into the role of Dinarzade—an observer from the sidelines of the dynamics of an eastern despotism—read into oriental tales, a form of narration that flourished from the late 17th to the late 18th century. The book does not seek exhaustively to catalogue the many, various, and frequently conflicting attitudes of 18th-century western Europeans to contemporary Asian states. Rather, it makes a case that between the late 17th and late 18th centuries, the Orient came to acquire both a loose conceptual unity and internal difference through persistent representation of its spaces and peoples as consumed by and in fiction. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.Less
This chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to look at what western readers who imagined themselves into the role of Dinarzade—an observer from the sidelines of the dynamics of an eastern despotism—read into oriental tales, a form of narration that flourished from the late 17th to the late 18th century. The book does not seek exhaustively to catalogue the many, various, and frequently conflicting attitudes of 18th-century western Europeans to contemporary Asian states. Rather, it makes a case that between the late 17th and late 18th centuries, the Orient came to acquire both a loose conceptual unity and internal difference through persistent representation of its spaces and peoples as consumed by and in fiction. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.
Ros Ballaster
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199234295
- eISBN:
- 9780191696657
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234295.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter uses the trope of transmigration, so popular in oriental tales, to describe the relationship established between Orient and Occident through the consumption of narratives of the East in ...
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This chapter uses the trope of transmigration, so popular in oriental tales, to describe the relationship established between Orient and Occident through the consumption of narratives of the East in 18th-century England. It maps each of the major genres of oriental narrative so that readers can orient themselves in the following discussions of the interaction between the representation of geographical spaces and generic traditions. The passage of consciousness from body to body in a process of both penance and improvement (the ‘oriental’ doctrine of transmigration) can function as a metaphor for the passage of narrative from one cultural space to another. It is, moreover, and importantly, both a spatial and a temporal experience; the soul moves through time from one body to another, adapting to its new environment at each turn but also bearing the imprint of its previous ‘life’, if only in terms of the role (high or low status) it takes on in each new form. The act of reading narrative might also be figured as a kind of transmigration: the projection of the reader's ‘spirit’ into the place/space/time of an ‘other’ or many ‘others’, which requires a constant shifting of consciousness and perspective that transforms the reading self in the process.Less
This chapter uses the trope of transmigration, so popular in oriental tales, to describe the relationship established between Orient and Occident through the consumption of narratives of the East in 18th-century England. It maps each of the major genres of oriental narrative so that readers can orient themselves in the following discussions of the interaction between the representation of geographical spaces and generic traditions. The passage of consciousness from body to body in a process of both penance and improvement (the ‘oriental’ doctrine of transmigration) can function as a metaphor for the passage of narrative from one cultural space to another. It is, moreover, and importantly, both a spatial and a temporal experience; the soul moves through time from one body to another, adapting to its new environment at each turn but also bearing the imprint of its previous ‘life’, if only in terms of the role (high or low status) it takes on in each new form. The act of reading narrative might also be figured as a kind of transmigration: the projection of the reader's ‘spirit’ into the place/space/time of an ‘other’ or many ‘others’, which requires a constant shifting of consciousness and perspective that transforms the reading self in the process.
Ros Ballaster
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199234295
- eISBN:
- 9780191696657
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234295.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter argues that the late 18th century ushered in a new aesthetics of difference in the place of the preceding century's tendency to attempt to understand the ‘East’ by means of analogy. ...
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This chapter argues that the late 18th century ushered in a new aesthetics of difference in the place of the preceding century's tendency to attempt to understand the ‘East’ by means of analogy. Interest in the ‘Orient’ intensifies and becomes more sophisticated in this period, but fictional narrative is no longer the dominant vehicle of representation; the perception of oriental cultures is increasingly dictated by visual representations in both architecture and art, by antiquarianism and by a burgeoning ethnography. Readings of William Beckford's Vathek (1786), Byron's oriental poetry of the first two decades of the 19th century and Don Juan, and a short oriental tale by Maria Edgeworth of 1802, illustrate both the new stress on spatial and visual comprehension of the Orient and a newly ironic perspective on the observing ‘western’ eye.Less
This chapter argues that the late 18th century ushered in a new aesthetics of difference in the place of the preceding century's tendency to attempt to understand the ‘East’ by means of analogy. Interest in the ‘Orient’ intensifies and becomes more sophisticated in this period, but fictional narrative is no longer the dominant vehicle of representation; the perception of oriental cultures is increasingly dictated by visual representations in both architecture and art, by antiquarianism and by a burgeoning ethnography. Readings of William Beckford's Vathek (1786), Byron's oriental poetry of the first two decades of the 19th century and Don Juan, and a short oriental tale by Maria Edgeworth of 1802, illustrate both the new stress on spatial and visual comprehension of the Orient and a newly ironic perspective on the observing ‘western’ eye.
LEON LITVACK
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198263517
- eISBN:
- 9780191682582
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198263517.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
This chapter discusses the secular, cultural, and historical factors that led Neale to investigate the Eastern Church. These factors are grouped under the heading ‘orientalism’. He faced debilitating ...
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This chapter discusses the secular, cultural, and historical factors that led Neale to investigate the Eastern Church. These factors are grouped under the heading ‘orientalism’. He faced debilitating deficiencies. The fact that he used the word ‘oriental’ placed him firmly within a recognized 19th-century tradition of scholarly and imaginative writing about the East. Acknowledging his limitations, Neale proceeded to decode the mysteries of the Orient for his readers. His particular brand of orientalism was his way of developing an imaginative link with Eastern Christendom, while remaining rooted to the West at the same time. He overcame some of the problems involved in writing about the East by studying the languages in which the source materials were written, creatd by careful research. He dealt with other factors by adding intuitive motivations to the theoretical ones already considered.Less
This chapter discusses the secular, cultural, and historical factors that led Neale to investigate the Eastern Church. These factors are grouped under the heading ‘orientalism’. He faced debilitating deficiencies. The fact that he used the word ‘oriental’ placed him firmly within a recognized 19th-century tradition of scholarly and imaginative writing about the East. Acknowledging his limitations, Neale proceeded to decode the mysteries of the Orient for his readers. His particular brand of orientalism was his way of developing an imaginative link with Eastern Christendom, while remaining rooted to the West at the same time. He overcame some of the problems involved in writing about the East by studying the languages in which the source materials were written, creatd by careful research. He dealt with other factors by adding intuitive motivations to the theoretical ones already considered.
Nathaniel Berman
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199260911
- eISBN:
- 9780191698699
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260911.003.0007
- Subject:
- Law, Human Rights and Immigration
‘The Appeals of the Orient’— in the February 1925 issue of the literary journal entitled Les Cahiers du Mois— summarized more than 100 responses to a questionnaire that was intended for various ...
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‘The Appeals of the Orient’— in the February 1925 issue of the literary journal entitled Les Cahiers du Mois— summarized more than 100 responses to a questionnaire that was intended for various cultural and literary writers. The survey attempted to explore issues regarding the Occident and the Orient — values that supposedly make the Occident superior, the features of both that would make each veer away from the other, and the expanding influences brought about by those in the East. Two months after the article was published, a group of rebels from Morocco and France experienced what was then referred to as the ‘War of the Riff’. This came about because the rebels did not want European occupation to expand within their territory. The rebels, however, were soon defeated as Spain and France were able to establish formalized zone divisions. Because this war proved to be of great significance in French culture and politics, this chapter studies the public discourse about the war, specifically on issues about the relationships the French has set out in the colonized world through international legal order and other such measures.Less
‘The Appeals of the Orient’— in the February 1925 issue of the literary journal entitled Les Cahiers du Mois— summarized more than 100 responses to a questionnaire that was intended for various cultural and literary writers. The survey attempted to explore issues regarding the Occident and the Orient — values that supposedly make the Occident superior, the features of both that would make each veer away from the other, and the expanding influences brought about by those in the East. Two months after the article was published, a group of rebels from Morocco and France experienced what was then referred to as the ‘War of the Riff’. This came about because the rebels did not want European occupation to expand within their territory. The rebels, however, were soon defeated as Spain and France were able to establish formalized zone divisions. Because this war proved to be of great significance in French culture and politics, this chapter studies the public discourse about the war, specifically on issues about the relationships the French has set out in the colonized world through international legal order and other such measures.
Douglas Kerr
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622099340
- eISBN:
- 9789882206892
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099340.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses natural history and figures of nature that are present in Western writing about the East. It examines how the wilderness is represented, how it is seen by those who enter it, ...
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This chapter discusses natural history and figures of nature that are present in Western writing about the East. It examines how the wilderness is represented, how it is seen by those who enter it, and how it returns their gaze. This helps constitute them as various kinds of subjects, such as writers, explorers, sportsmen, and naturalists, who are in search of paradise, on missions of subjugation, or scientific expeditions. The chapter also looks at the single and instructive case of the uses of nature, particularly the role of animals, in George Orwell's representation and understanding of the Orient.Less
This chapter discusses natural history and figures of nature that are present in Western writing about the East. It examines how the wilderness is represented, how it is seen by those who enter it, and how it returns their gaze. This helps constitute them as various kinds of subjects, such as writers, explorers, sportsmen, and naturalists, who are in search of paradise, on missions of subjugation, or scientific expeditions. The chapter also looks at the single and instructive case of the uses of nature, particularly the role of animals, in George Orwell's representation and understanding of the Orient.
Douglas Kerr
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622099340
- eISBN:
- 9789882206892
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099340.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses Orientalism and the importance of knowing the Oriental people. Edward Said's book, Orientalism, helped propagate an understanding of Western discourse about the East as a ...
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This chapter discusses Orientalism and the importance of knowing the Oriental people. Edward Said's book, Orientalism, helped propagate an understanding of Western discourse about the East as a system of knowledge or power. Said also argued that through Orientalism, the West authors the East and becomes its authority. The chapter looks at the knowledge held by Rudyard Kipling's Strickland, who is an English police officer in India and a recurrent character in Kipling's stories. It also states that although knowing the Oriental was important in order to control the Orient, too much knowledge weakened the epistemological and political barrier that functioned to keep people, rulers and ruled, in their proper places.Less
This chapter discusses Orientalism and the importance of knowing the Oriental people. Edward Said's book, Orientalism, helped propagate an understanding of Western discourse about the East as a system of knowledge or power. Said also argued that through Orientalism, the West authors the East and becomes its authority. The chapter looks at the knowledge held by Rudyard Kipling's Strickland, who is an English police officer in India and a recurrent character in Kipling's stories. It also states that although knowing the Oriental was important in order to control the Orient, too much knowledge weakened the epistemological and political barrier that functioned to keep people, rulers and ruled, in their proper places.
Charles Issawi
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195118131
- eISBN:
- 9780199854554
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195118131.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
The chapter examines the profound changes in the West's perception of the Orient between the 18th and 19th centuries from an attitude of respect and admiration to one of contempt. The term “Orient” ...
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The chapter examines the profound changes in the West's perception of the Orient between the 18th and 19th centuries from an attitude of respect and admiration to one of contempt. The term “Orient” refers to India, China, and Islam. Various factors are analyzed that were said to produce the change. One is the revival of Christianity in Britain and France making those regions less tolerant of other religions. Other factors include the military, political, and economic domination these countries achieved over Asia and Africa, the overwhelming technological superiority of the West, and the increase in respect for women. Such practices as footbinding, suttee, and polygamy seemed intolerable causing the West to condemn these cultures. Analysis is brought up to date by discussing important relevant developments in the 19th and 20th centuries.Less
The chapter examines the profound changes in the West's perception of the Orient between the 18th and 19th centuries from an attitude of respect and admiration to one of contempt. The term “Orient” refers to India, China, and Islam. Various factors are analyzed that were said to produce the change. One is the revival of Christianity in Britain and France making those regions less tolerant of other religions. Other factors include the military, political, and economic domination these countries achieved over Asia and Africa, the overwhelming technological superiority of the West, and the increase in respect for women. Such practices as footbinding, suttee, and polygamy seemed intolerable causing the West to condemn these cultures. Analysis is brought up to date by discussing important relevant developments in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Rodolphe Gasché
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823234349
- eISBN:
- 9780823241279
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234349.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The fascination of early romantics with the Orient was in some respects biased. However, their prejudices cannot simply be retraced to crude national and colonial interests, since, as Said remarks in ...
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The fascination of early romantics with the Orient was in some respects biased. However, their prejudices cannot simply be retraced to crude national and colonial interests, since, as Said remarks in Orientalism, this would mean to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact. Nor can the romantics' image of the Orient be derived from their submission of the object Orient to a discourse of knowledge, which Said, in the aftermath of Foucault, characterizes as a discourse of power. Such an assertion would ignore the extent to which the discourse of knowledge is constituted in advance by what it is said to subjugate. It is this intimacy, complicity, and solidarity between the Orient and the discourse of knowledge, which is intended to develop in this chapter.Less
The fascination of early romantics with the Orient was in some respects biased. However, their prejudices cannot simply be retraced to crude national and colonial interests, since, as Said remarks in Orientalism, this would mean to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact. Nor can the romantics' image of the Orient be derived from their submission of the object Orient to a discourse of knowledge, which Said, in the aftermath of Foucault, characterizes as a discourse of power. Such an assertion would ignore the extent to which the discourse of knowledge is constituted in advance by what it is said to subjugate. It is this intimacy, complicity, and solidarity between the Orient and the discourse of knowledge, which is intended to develop in this chapter.
Carmen Amado Mendes
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9789888139002
- eISBN:
- 9789888180127
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888139002.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This chapter focuses on three sensitive issues of the transition period: the inclusion in the Macau Basic Law of the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as ...
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This chapter focuses on three sensitive issues of the transition period: the inclusion in the Macau Basic Law of the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the construction of the Macau International Airport; and negotiations surrounding the Orient Foundation. The issue of the Covenants highlights the lack of Portuguese foresight in negotiating the Joint Declaration. The construction of the airport was perceived by the Portuguese as vital to guarantee Macau's autonomy. During the airport negotiations they took advantage of the Tian'anmen incident in order to gain concessions. The issue of the Orient Foundation, with vested interests of different political parties and politicians limiting the bargaining power of the Portuguese negotiators, suggests the absence of a common strategy on the Portuguese side during the first years of the transition.Less
This chapter focuses on three sensitive issues of the transition period: the inclusion in the Macau Basic Law of the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the construction of the Macau International Airport; and negotiations surrounding the Orient Foundation. The issue of the Covenants highlights the lack of Portuguese foresight in negotiating the Joint Declaration. The construction of the airport was perceived by the Portuguese as vital to guarantee Macau's autonomy. During the airport negotiations they took advantage of the Tian'anmen incident in order to gain concessions. The issue of the Orient Foundation, with vested interests of different political parties and politicians limiting the bargaining power of the Portuguese negotiators, suggests the absence of a common strategy on the Portuguese side during the first years of the transition.
Anthony Snodgrass
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748623334
- eISBN:
- 9780748653577
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748623334.003.0009
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Archaeology: Classical
This chapter is devoted to Greco-Oriental contacts at the turn of the second and first millennia BC. The central concern is with continuities and discontinuities: essentially with the question of the ...
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This chapter is devoted to Greco-Oriental contacts at the turn of the second and first millennia BC. The central concern is with continuities and discontinuities: essentially with the question of the ancestry of the Greek world of the Early Iron Age and thus, less directly, of archaic and classical Greece. In the field of the visual arts, many of the most impressive Greco-Oriental parallels are between Near Eastern monuments of Bronze Age date, and Greek ones of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. It is a nice irony that Lefkandi, the site without which none of the arguments cited at the beginning would have been advanced in so strong a form (whether about the continuity of the polis, or more especially about the survival of the oriental links of the Mycenaean world) was a Middle Helladic site with a thin Mycenaean occupation, to which a return in force was evidently made only in the final stages of the Bronze Age.Less
This chapter is devoted to Greco-Oriental contacts at the turn of the second and first millennia BC. The central concern is with continuities and discontinuities: essentially with the question of the ancestry of the Greek world of the Early Iron Age and thus, less directly, of archaic and classical Greece. In the field of the visual arts, many of the most impressive Greco-Oriental parallels are between Near Eastern monuments of Bronze Age date, and Greek ones of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. It is a nice irony that Lefkandi, the site without which none of the arguments cited at the beginning would have been advanced in so strong a form (whether about the continuity of the polis, or more especially about the survival of the oriental links of the Mycenaean world) was a Middle Helladic site with a thin Mycenaean occupation, to which a return in force was evidently made only in the final stages of the Bronze Age.
Ian Coller
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520260641
- eISBN:
- 9780520947542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520260641.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter suggests that the Orient/Occident dyad that Edward Said considered fundamental to European self-understanding was, if not absent, far less stable in this period than his argument would ...
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This chapter suggests that the Orient/Occident dyad that Edward Said considered fundamental to European self-understanding was, if not absent, far less stable in this period than his argument would imply. Crucially for the understanding of the experience of Egypt of the occupation of France, some historians have seen in the Egyptian expedition less a capricious attempt to impose an established Western social model on the benighted East than a speculative “laboratory” for attempting many of the ideas of the Enlightenment outside of local European constraints. Egypt was one of the cradles of imperialism of Napoleon Bonaparte. Said's critique of Orientalism has encouraged historians to see from the very beginning of this intellectual project a European desire to use knowledge as a force for the subjugation of an “Orient” that it consistently depicted as passive and stagnant, in order to impose its dominating will.Less
This chapter suggests that the Orient/Occident dyad that Edward Said considered fundamental to European self-understanding was, if not absent, far less stable in this period than his argument would imply. Crucially for the understanding of the experience of Egypt of the occupation of France, some historians have seen in the Egyptian expedition less a capricious attempt to impose an established Western social model on the benighted East than a speculative “laboratory” for attempting many of the ideas of the Enlightenment outside of local European constraints. Egypt was one of the cradles of imperialism of Napoleon Bonaparte. Said's critique of Orientalism has encouraged historians to see from the very beginning of this intellectual project a European desire to use knowledge as a force for the subjugation of an “Orient” that it consistently depicted as passive and stagnant, in order to impose its dominating will.
Hugh Urban
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520230620
- eISBN:
- 9780520936898
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520230620.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range ...
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A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life—Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first “discovery” of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be. Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, the book reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West—a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and other that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.Less
A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life—Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first “discovery” of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be. Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, the book reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West—a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and other that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.
