Josephine Nock-Hee Park
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195332735
- eISBN:
- 9780199868148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332735.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, American, 20th Century Literature
The conclusion briefly elaborates the significance of American Orientalism in the formation of Asian American literature. By reconsidering the complex negotiation with Orientalism in the work of the ...
More
The conclusion briefly elaborates the significance of American Orientalism in the formation of Asian American literature. By reconsidering the complex negotiation with Orientalism in the work of the figurehead of the ethnic nationalist movement, Frank Chin, this conclusion suggests the persistence and continuing significance of an Orientalist legacy for Asian American literature.Less
The conclusion briefly elaborates the significance of American Orientalism in the formation of Asian American literature. By reconsidering the complex negotiation with Orientalism in the work of the figurehead of the ethnic nationalist movement, Frank Chin, this conclusion suggests the persistence and continuing significance of an Orientalist legacy for Asian American literature.
Dúnlaith Bird
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199644162
- eISBN:
- 9780199949984
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199644162.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Vagabondage emerges as a totemic concept in European women’s travel writing from 1850, a physical and textual elaboration of gender identity in motion. This book constitutes a full ...
More
Vagabondage emerges as a totemic concept in European women’s travel writing from 1850, a physical and textual elaboration of gender identity in motion. This book constitutes a full length study of this paradigm. For travellers including Olympe Audouard, Isabella Bird, Isabelle Eberhardt and Freya Stark, vagabondage is a means of forcing pushing out the physical, geographical and textual parameters by which ‘women’ are defined. This book explores the negotiations of European women travel writers from 1850-1950 within the traditionally male-oriented discourses of colonialism and Orientalism. Moving from historical overview to close textual reading, it traces a complex web of tacit collusion and gleeful defiance. These women improvise access to the highly gendered ‘imaginative geography’ of the Orient. Tactics including cross-dressing, commerciality and the effacement of their male companions are used to carve out a space for their unconventional and often sexually hybrid constructions. Using a composite theoretical basis of the later critical work of Judith Butler and Edward Said, this comparative study of British and French colonial empires and gender norms draws out the nuances in these travellers’ constructions of gender identity. Women travel writers are shown to play an important role in the legacy of sexual experimentation and self-creation in the Orient, traditionally associated with male writers including Gide and Pierre Loti and now ripe for critical re-evaluation. This study demonstrates how these women use lived experiences of restriction and negotiation to elaborate advanced theories of motion and gender construction, presaging the concerns of twenty-first century feminism and post-colonialism.Less
Vagabondage emerges as a totemic concept in European women’s travel writing from 1850, a physical and textual elaboration of gender identity in motion. This book constitutes a full length study of this paradigm. For travellers including Olympe Audouard, Isabella Bird, Isabelle Eberhardt and Freya Stark, vagabondage is a means of forcing pushing out the physical, geographical and textual parameters by which ‘women’ are defined. This book explores the negotiations of European women travel writers from 1850-1950 within the traditionally male-oriented discourses of colonialism and Orientalism. Moving from historical overview to close textual reading, it traces a complex web of tacit collusion and gleeful defiance. These women improvise access to the highly gendered ‘imaginative geography’ of the Orient. Tactics including cross-dressing, commerciality and the effacement of their male companions are used to carve out a space for their unconventional and often sexually hybrid constructions. Using a composite theoretical basis of the later critical work of Judith Butler and Edward Said, this comparative study of British and French colonial empires and gender norms draws out the nuances in these travellers’ constructions of gender identity. Women travel writers are shown to play an important role in the legacy of sexual experimentation and self-creation in the Orient, traditionally associated with male writers including Gide and Pierre Loti and now ripe for critical re-evaluation. This study demonstrates how these women use lived experiences of restriction and negotiation to elaborate advanced theories of motion and gender construction, presaging the concerns of twenty-first century feminism and post-colonialism.
Javed Majeed
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198117865
- eISBN:
- 9780191671098
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117865.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Drawing on contemporary critical work on colonialism and the cross-cultural encounter, this book is a study of the emergence of utilitarianism as a new political language in Britain in the late-18th ...
More
Drawing on contemporary critical work on colonialism and the cross-cultural encounter, this book is a study of the emergence of utilitarianism as a new political language in Britain in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. It focuses on the relationship between this language and the complexities of British Imperial experience in India at the time. Examining the work of James Mill and Sir William Jones, and also that of the poets Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, the book highlights the role played by aesthetic and linguistic attitudes in the formulation of British views on India, and reveals how closely these attitudes were linked to the definition of cultural identities. To this end, Mill's utilitarian study of India is shown to function both as an attack on the conservative orientalism of the period, and as part of a larger critique of British society itself. In so doing, the book demonstrates how complex British attitudes to India were in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and how this might be explained in the light of domestic and imperial contexts.Less
Drawing on contemporary critical work on colonialism and the cross-cultural encounter, this book is a study of the emergence of utilitarianism as a new political language in Britain in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. It focuses on the relationship between this language and the complexities of British Imperial experience in India at the time. Examining the work of James Mill and Sir William Jones, and also that of the poets Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, the book highlights the role played by aesthetic and linguistic attitudes in the formulation of British views on India, and reveals how closely these attitudes were linked to the definition of cultural identities. To this end, Mill's utilitarian study of India is shown to function both as an attack on the conservative orientalism of the period, and as part of a larger critique of British society itself. In so doing, the book demonstrates how complex British attitudes to India were in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and how this might be explained in the light of domestic and imperial contexts.
Monica M. Ringer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781474478731
- eISBN:
- 9781474491211
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474478731.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, if the new intellectual landscape of the 19th ...
More
This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, if the new intellectual landscape of the 19th century. The lens of Islamic Modernism is used to uncover the underlying epistemology and methodology of historicism that penetrated the Middle East and South Asia in this period, forcing and enabling a recalibration of the definition, nature, function and place of religion. Muslim Modernists engaged in a sophisticated project of theological reform designed to marry their twin commitments to religion and modernity; they were in conversation with European scholarship and Catholic Modernism, but more importantly, with their own complex Islamic traditions. This book provides a new framework for conceptualizing the relationship between Western and non-Western modernities. It demonstrates that Islamic Modernists adopted intellectual frameworks that first emerged in Europe, then deployed them to argue for the superiority of Islam. For Islamic Modernists, Islam had historically been, and could once again become a motor of modernity and the solution to contemporary ‘backwardness.’ Islamic Modernists considered in this book include Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (Iran), Imam Bayezidof (Russia), Namik Kemal (Ottoman Empire) and Syed Ameer Ali (India).Less
This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, if the new intellectual landscape of the 19th century. The lens of Islamic Modernism is used to uncover the underlying epistemology and methodology of historicism that penetrated the Middle East and South Asia in this period, forcing and enabling a recalibration of the definition, nature, function and place of religion. Muslim Modernists engaged in a sophisticated project of theological reform designed to marry their twin commitments to religion and modernity; they were in conversation with European scholarship and Catholic Modernism, but more importantly, with their own complex Islamic traditions. This book provides a new framework for conceptualizing the relationship between Western and non-Western modernities. It demonstrates that Islamic Modernists adopted intellectual frameworks that first emerged in Europe, then deployed them to argue for the superiority of Islam. For Islamic Modernists, Islam had historically been, and could once again become a motor of modernity and the solution to contemporary ‘backwardness.’ Islamic Modernists considered in this book include Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (Iran), Imam Bayezidof (Russia), Namik Kemal (Ottoman Empire) and Syed Ameer Ali (India).
Christopher Bush
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195393828
- eISBN:
- 9780199866601
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393828.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Rather than focusing on the accuracy of this ...
More
Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Rather than focusing on the accuracy of this ideograph as a kind of representation of China (a focus that would yield predictable results), Ideographic Modernism reconstructs the specific history of the ideograph in order to explore the question of representation in more fundamental ways, ways that reflect the diversity and complexity of literary modernism itself. On one level, the book makes an argument about the meaning and function of the ideograph during the modernist period, namely that this imagined Chinese writing was a complex response to the various writings of such technological media as the photo-graph, the phono-graph, the cinemato-graph, and the tele-graph. Through analyses of works by Claudel, Pound, Kafka, Benjamin, Segalen, and Valéry, among others, Ideographic Modernism traces the interweavings of Western modernity’s ethnographic and technological imaginaries, in which the cultural effects of technological media assumed “Chinese” forms, even as traditional representations of “the Orient” lived on in modernist-era responses to media. On another level, the book makes a methodological argument, demonstrating new ways of recovering the generally overlooked presence of China in the text of Western modernism. In addition to being its subject matter, then, ideographic modernism is also the book’s method: a polemically “literal” way of reading that calls for reevaluations both of how modernist literature related to its historical contexts and of the ways in which we can understand that relationship today.Less
Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Rather than focusing on the accuracy of this ideograph as a kind of representation of China (a focus that would yield predictable results), Ideographic Modernism reconstructs the specific history of the ideograph in order to explore the question of representation in more fundamental ways, ways that reflect the diversity and complexity of literary modernism itself. On one level, the book makes an argument about the meaning and function of the ideograph during the modernist period, namely that this imagined Chinese writing was a complex response to the various writings of such technological media as the photo-graph, the phono-graph, the cinemato-graph, and the tele-graph. Through analyses of works by Claudel, Pound, Kafka, Benjamin, Segalen, and Valéry, among others, Ideographic Modernism traces the interweavings of Western modernity’s ethnographic and technological imaginaries, in which the cultural effects of technological media assumed “Chinese” forms, even as traditional representations of “the Orient” lived on in modernist-era responses to media. On another level, the book makes a methodological argument, demonstrating new ways of recovering the generally overlooked presence of China in the text of Western modernism. In addition to being its subject matter, then, ideographic modernism is also the book’s method: a polemically “literal” way of reading that calls for reevaluations both of how modernist literature related to its historical contexts and of the ways in which we can understand that relationship today.
Philip Lutgendorf
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195309225
- eISBN:
- 9780199785391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195309225.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Hinduism
Opening with a brief tour of modern Hindu temples that feature increasingly monumental icons of Hanuman, this introductory chapter poses the question of why a deity of such apparent prominence in ...
More
Opening with a brief tour of modern Hindu temples that feature increasingly monumental icons of Hanuman, this introductory chapter poses the question of why a deity of such apparent prominence in popular practice has generally been marginalized or overlooked in academic scholarship. It seeks the roots of this paradox in the Orientalism of Euro-American scholarship, especially during the period of the British Empire, which applied conceptual categories derived from Judeo-Christian discourse to the understanding of Indian religious traditions. Deities in animal-like forms were especially troubling to Western scholars, who invented labels like “theriomorph”, “fetish”, and “totem” to describe them, and created (e.g., in the folklore research of William Crooke) a false dichotomy between “major” and “minor” deities. After describing the present study's remedial approach and outlining the material to be presented in subsequent chapters, the chapter concludes with an explanation of the most common names and epithets by which Hanuman is known in various regions of India.Less
Opening with a brief tour of modern Hindu temples that feature increasingly monumental icons of Hanuman, this introductory chapter poses the question of why a deity of such apparent prominence in popular practice has generally been marginalized or overlooked in academic scholarship. It seeks the roots of this paradox in the Orientalism of Euro-American scholarship, especially during the period of the British Empire, which applied conceptual categories derived from Judeo-Christian discourse to the understanding of Indian religious traditions. Deities in animal-like forms were especially troubling to Western scholars, who invented labels like “theriomorph”, “fetish”, and “totem” to describe them, and created (e.g., in the folklore research of William Crooke) a false dichotomy between “major” and “minor” deities. After describing the present study's remedial approach and outlining the material to be presented in subsequent chapters, the chapter concludes with an explanation of the most common names and epithets by which Hanuman is known in various regions of India.
Arieh B. Saposnik
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195331219
- eISBN:
- 9780199868100
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331219.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
Becoming Hebrew is a study of the ways in which a Zionist national culture was generated in the Jewish Yishuv (prestate community) of Palestine between 1900 and 1914. The book addresses ...
More
Becoming Hebrew is a study of the ways in which a Zionist national culture was generated in the Jewish Yishuv (prestate community) of Palestine between 1900 and 1914. The book addresses three principal lacunae in the study of Zionist culture to date. The first of these is chronological. Much of the literature to date has assumed that a distinctive Zionist national culture began to appear in Palestine during the interwar period, whereas Becoming Hebrew argues that its formative period in fact predates the war. Out of this chronological claim emerge the two additional, more conceptually and theoretically substantive, correctives. In the first instance, the book shows that the relationship between the Zionist cultural undertaking and traditional Jewish culture is far more complicated and nuanced than has often been recognized. Joining a new and important historiographical trend, the book suggests further that the Zionist case sheds important light on nationalism generally, which itself emerges in a more complex and dialectical relationship with the religious cultures and traditional societies out of which it grows than has often been acknowledged in much of the now classical literature. Finally, in its conceptualization of “culture” as created in Zionist Palestine, the book synthesizes a literary‐like study of imageries and discourses and a more anthropological examination of observable cultural practices and tangible, public social processes to produce a history of culture as a broad interweaving of many aspects of human life.Less
Becoming Hebrew is a study of the ways in which a Zionist national culture was generated in the Jewish Yishuv (prestate community) of Palestine between 1900 and 1914. The book addresses three principal lacunae in the study of Zionist culture to date. The first of these is chronological. Much of the literature to date has assumed that a distinctive Zionist national culture began to appear in Palestine during the interwar period, whereas Becoming Hebrew argues that its formative period in fact predates the war. Out of this chronological claim emerge the two additional, more conceptually and theoretically substantive, correctives. In the first instance, the book shows that the relationship between the Zionist cultural undertaking and traditional Jewish culture is far more complicated and nuanced than has often been recognized. Joining a new and important historiographical trend, the book suggests further that the Zionist case sheds important light on nationalism generally, which itself emerges in a more complex and dialectical relationship with the religious cultures and traditional societies out of which it grows than has often been acknowledged in much of the now classical literature. Finally, in its conceptualization of “culture” as created in Zionist Palestine, the book synthesizes a literary‐like study of imageries and discourses and a more anthropological examination of observable cultural practices and tangible, public social processes to produce a history of culture as a broad interweaving of many aspects of human life.
Timothy Fitzgerald
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195300093
- eISBN:
- 9780199868636
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195300093.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
This book analyzes the development of different meanings of the term “religion” in different contexts and in relation to other categories with shifting and unstable nuances such as the state, ...
More
This book analyzes the development of different meanings of the term “religion” in different contexts and in relation to other categories with shifting and unstable nuances such as the state, politics, economics, and the secular. It traces a major transformation of the category as a function of Euro‐American colonialism and capitalism from its traditional meaning of Christian Truth to the modern generic and pluralized category of religions and world religions. For centuries the English word Religion meant Christian Truth, and it stood in opposition to superstition, paganism, and falsehood. As such Religion encompassed not only individual salvation but also, and of equal importance, what we today refer to as the secular, the state, politics, economics, law, and science. Until the second half of the seventeenth century there was no powerful discourse on the nonreligious. Indeed, terms such as politics and economics were newly coined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the term secular had a profoundly different nuance, for example, referring to the priesthood. Furthermore, the discourse on Religion as Christian Truth in contrast to superstition and paganism overlapped significantly with discourses on “our” civility, as opposed to “their” barbarity, and thus functioned as an expression of the superiority of the Christian male elite. Current uncritical practices of historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and religionists in their projection of modern Anglophone categories such as “religion,” “politics,” and “economics” as though they are eternal features of all human experience and social organisation indirectly and usually unconsciously serve the interests of the modern state under the guise of secular objectivity.Less
This book analyzes the development of different meanings of the term “religion” in different contexts and in relation to other categories with shifting and unstable nuances such as the state, politics, economics, and the secular. It traces a major transformation of the category as a function of Euro‐American colonialism and capitalism from its traditional meaning of Christian Truth to the modern generic and pluralized category of religions and world religions. For centuries the English word Religion meant Christian Truth, and it stood in opposition to superstition, paganism, and falsehood. As such Religion encompassed not only individual salvation but also, and of equal importance, what we today refer to as the secular, the state, politics, economics, law, and science. Until the second half of the seventeenth century there was no powerful discourse on the nonreligious. Indeed, terms such as politics and economics were newly coined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the term secular had a profoundly different nuance, for example, referring to the priesthood. Furthermore, the discourse on Religion as Christian Truth in contrast to superstition and paganism overlapped significantly with discourses on “our” civility, as opposed to “their” barbarity, and thus functioned as an expression of the superiority of the Christian male elite. Current uncritical practices of historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and religionists in their projection of modern Anglophone categories such as “religion,” “politics,” and “economics” as though they are eternal features of all human experience and social organisation indirectly and usually unconsciously serve the interests of the modern state under the guise of secular objectivity.
Steven Heine
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195326772
- eISBN:
- 9780199870363
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195326772.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
This chapter provides a methodological anchor and framework for the constructive juxtaposition that enables a creative interaction and dialogue instead of opposition and polarization between the ...
More
This chapter provides a methodological anchor and framework for the constructive juxtaposition that enables a creative interaction and dialogue instead of opposition and polarization between the traditional and critical Zen positions, by orienting the discussion in terms of the main ingredients of Zen's original self‐definition and how in early sources Zen portrayed itself as a unique and distinctive tradition. First there is a discussion of the role of Orientalism for interpreting and misinterpreting a phenomenon such as Zen Buddhism. Then the chapter establishes a basis for analyzing and evaluating the exchange of ideas concerning the real meaning of Zen theory and practice.Less
This chapter provides a methodological anchor and framework for the constructive juxtaposition that enables a creative interaction and dialogue instead of opposition and polarization between the traditional and critical Zen positions, by orienting the discussion in terms of the main ingredients of Zen's original self‐definition and how in early sources Zen portrayed itself as a unique and distinctive tradition. First there is a discussion of the role of Orientalism for interpreting and misinterpreting a phenomenon such as Zen Buddhism. Then the chapter establishes a basis for analyzing and evaluating the exchange of ideas concerning the real meaning of Zen theory and practice.
Frederick Quinn
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195325638
- eISBN:
- 9780199869336
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195325638.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
This chapter discusses dramatic changes the image of Islam underwent in the West during the 19th century. Topics covered include Napoleon Bonaparte's forays into Islamic religion, Orientalism in ...
More
This chapter discusses dramatic changes the image of Islam underwent in the West during the 19th century. Topics covered include Napoleon Bonaparte's forays into Islamic religion, Orientalism in British arts and letters, and America as the Holy Land without Arabs.Less
This chapter discusses dramatic changes the image of Islam underwent in the West during the 19th century. Topics covered include Napoleon Bonaparte's forays into Islamic religion, Orientalism in British arts and letters, and America as the Holy Land without Arabs.
Frederick Quinn
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195325638
- eISBN:
- 9780199869336
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195325638.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
This chapter discusses the more subtle, expansive, and complex image of Islam in the West during the 20th century, characterized by the twin elements of attraction and repulsion. Topics covered ...
More
This chapter discusses the more subtle, expansive, and complex image of Islam in the West during the 20th century, characterized by the twin elements of attraction and repulsion. Topics covered include the Middle East after World War I, new policies towards the Middle East, emergence of a new understanding of Islam, Islamic themes on stage and in films, and American Orientalism.Less
This chapter discusses the more subtle, expansive, and complex image of Islam in the West during the 20th century, characterized by the twin elements of attraction and repulsion. Topics covered include the Middle East after World War I, new policies towards the Middle East, emergence of a new understanding of Islam, Islamic themes on stage and in films, and American Orientalism.
Edith Bruder
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195333565
- eISBN:
- 9780199868889
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195333565.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter explores encounters between European and non-European that raises questions of “difference” and “otherness”. It argues that Europeans, when absorbing the newly discovered lands in ...
More
This chapter explores encounters between European and non-European that raises questions of “difference” and “otherness”. It argues that Europeans, when absorbing the newly discovered lands in America, Africa, and the Pacific, both shaped and distorted to their liking the image of the “other.” The long history of blackness as a common denominator of the inferiority of Africans as well as Jews in Western culture is discussed.Less
This chapter explores encounters between European and non-European that raises questions of “difference” and “otherness”. It argues that Europeans, when absorbing the newly discovered lands in America, Africa, and the Pacific, both shaped and distorted to their liking the image of the “other.” The long history of blackness as a common denominator of the inferiority of Africans as well as Jews in Western culture is discussed.
Timothy Fitzgerald
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195300093
- eISBN:
- 9780199868636
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195300093.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
This chapter argues that throughout the vicissitudes of discourses on Religion and religions, there has always been a significant overlap with a parallel discourse on civility and barbarity. By ...
More
This chapter argues that throughout the vicissitudes of discourses on Religion and religions, there has always been a significant overlap with a parallel discourse on civility and barbarity. By noticing this overlap of discursive formations we can see a major source of continuity underlying the radical change in cosmological assumptions that have led to the invention of the modern “secular.” The Church, which was also a State, drew on earlier Greek and Roman self‐representations between “our” civility and rationality as against “their” barbarity and madness. Religion as Our Truth is difficult to separate from the self‐representations of Christian male elites as the upholders of a rational civility which provided salvation from pagan madness. As modern ideology transformed the meanings of terms like “religion” and “natural reason,” and generated new dichotomies such as faith and science or private piety and public rationality, the persistent discourse on civility and barbarity became attached to modern imperial and orientalist representations of white, Protestant males, imbued with scientific reason and rational religion, offering the salvational disciplines of civility to barbaric, irrational, and feminine orientals unable to organize their own polities.Less
This chapter argues that throughout the vicissitudes of discourses on Religion and religions, there has always been a significant overlap with a parallel discourse on civility and barbarity. By noticing this overlap of discursive formations we can see a major source of continuity underlying the radical change in cosmological assumptions that have led to the invention of the modern “secular.” The Church, which was also a State, drew on earlier Greek and Roman self‐representations between “our” civility and rationality as against “their” barbarity and madness. Religion as Our Truth is difficult to separate from the self‐representations of Christian male elites as the upholders of a rational civility which provided salvation from pagan madness. As modern ideology transformed the meanings of terms like “religion” and “natural reason,” and generated new dichotomies such as faith and science or private piety and public rationality, the persistent discourse on civility and barbarity became attached to modern imperial and orientalist representations of white, Protestant males, imbued with scientific reason and rational religion, offering the salvational disciplines of civility to barbaric, irrational, and feminine orientals unable to organize their own polities.
David L. McMahan
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195183276
- eISBN:
- 9780199870882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195183276.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
What many Americans and Europeans understand by “Buddhism” is actually a hybrid of a number of Buddhist traditions that have cross-fertilized with the dominant discourses of western modernity, ...
More
What many Americans and Europeans understand by “Buddhism” is actually a hybrid of a number of Buddhist traditions that have cross-fertilized with the dominant discourses of western modernity, especially those rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism, and Protestant Christianity. The popular western picture of Buddhism is neither unambiguously “there“ in ancient Buddhist texts and lived traditions nor merely a fantasy of an educated elite population in the West, an image with no corresponding object. It is, rather, an actual new form of Buddhism that is the result of a process of modernization, westernization, reinterpretation, image-making, revitalization, and reform that has been taking place not only in the West but also in Asian countries for over a century.Less
What many Americans and Europeans understand by “Buddhism” is actually a hybrid of a number of Buddhist traditions that have cross-fertilized with the dominant discourses of western modernity, especially those rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism, and Protestant Christianity. The popular western picture of Buddhism is neither unambiguously “there“ in ancient Buddhist texts and lived traditions nor merely a fantasy of an educated elite population in the West, an image with no corresponding object. It is, rather, an actual new form of Buddhism that is the result of a process of modernization, westernization, reinterpretation, image-making, revitalization, and reform that has been taking place not only in the West but also in Asian countries for over a century.
Bridget Orr
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199554157
- eISBN:
- 9780191720437
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199554157.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter surveys the mostly “illegitimate” theatrical forms in which The Thousand and One Nights appeared on stage between 1707 and c.1830, arguing that these dramas of state, farces, burlettas, ...
More
This chapter surveys the mostly “illegitimate” theatrical forms in which The Thousand and One Nights appeared on stage between 1707 and c.1830, arguing that these dramas of state, farces, burlettas, melodramas, romances, and pantomimes effectively created popular Georgian Orientalism. Throughout this period, episodes drawn from the Arabian Nights facilitated critiques of domestic high politics while also establishing a vision of the Orient as despotic, wealthy, luxurious, and sensual. In the early decades of the 19th century however, dramatizations of “Sinbad the Sailor,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “Aladdin” gradually supplanted tales and episodes that allegorized domestic politics, a change owing to the so-called orphan tales' ability to symbolically negotiate the tensions accompanying the sudden wealth creation and social dislocation associated with nascent industrial capitalism.Less
This chapter surveys the mostly “illegitimate” theatrical forms in which The Thousand and One Nights appeared on stage between 1707 and c.1830, arguing that these dramas of state, farces, burlettas, melodramas, romances, and pantomimes effectively created popular Georgian Orientalism. Throughout this period, episodes drawn from the Arabian Nights facilitated critiques of domestic high politics while also establishing a vision of the Orient as despotic, wealthy, luxurious, and sensual. In the early decades of the 19th century however, dramatizations of “Sinbad the Sailor,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “Aladdin” gradually supplanted tales and episodes that allegorized domestic politics, a change owing to the so-called orphan tales' ability to symbolically negotiate the tensions accompanying the sudden wealth creation and social dislocation associated with nascent industrial capitalism.
Arieh Bruce Saposnik
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195331219
- eISBN:
- 9780199868100
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331219.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
Beginning with the Young Turk revolution in 1908, this chapter examines the changing conceptions of East and West as they were manifested in Yishuv culture. Zionism's call for a Jewish return to “the ...
More
Beginning with the Young Turk revolution in 1908, this chapter examines the changing conceptions of East and West as they were manifested in Yishuv culture. Zionism's call for a Jewish return to “the East” was rooted in part in a broader European fascination with “the Orient.” This interest in the East coincided in time and in much of its imagery with a conceptual division of Europe itself into its “western” and “eastern” parts. The Jews were deeply implicated in these twin conceptualizations of the Orient and of Europe's own “Orient” at home, particularly with the notion that Jews constituted a semi‐Asiatic, foreign element in Europe. Competing images of Occident and Orient—resonating with a wide range of racial, social, political, and cultural overtones—would become not only central elements in efforts to create a new Hebrew language, art, and music but also defining aspects of the Yishuv's institutions, rituals, and national liturgy.Less
Beginning with the Young Turk revolution in 1908, this chapter examines the changing conceptions of East and West as they were manifested in Yishuv culture. Zionism's call for a Jewish return to “the East” was rooted in part in a broader European fascination with “the Orient.” This interest in the East coincided in time and in much of its imagery with a conceptual division of Europe itself into its “western” and “eastern” parts. The Jews were deeply implicated in these twin conceptualizations of the Orient and of Europe's own “Orient” at home, particularly with the notion that Jews constituted a semi‐Asiatic, foreign element in Europe. Competing images of Occident and Orient—resonating with a wide range of racial, social, political, and cultural overtones—would become not only central elements in efforts to create a new Hebrew language, art, and music but also defining aspects of the Yishuv's institutions, rituals, and national liturgy.
Arieh Bruce Saposnik
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195331219
- eISBN:
- 9780199868100
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331219.003.0009
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
Continuing with the theme of Orient and Occident in Zionist culture, this chapter examines the ways in which competing conceptions helped determine the role of Oriental Jews and Palestinian Arabs in ...
More
Continuing with the theme of Orient and Occident in Zionist culture, this chapter examines the ways in which competing conceptions helped determine the role of Oriental Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the emerging Hebrew nationhood. Arguing against a historiography that correlates Zionism with an oversimplified version of European Orientalism, the chapter contends that, within Zionist culture, a myth of Sephardic supremacy coexisted with a sense of Ashkenazi superiority to shape the roles envisioned for the nation's Jewish ethnic groups. Similarly, romantic images of Arabs as racial counterparts and as models for the new Hebrews clashed with a view of the Arab as primitive and responsible for the land's desolation in a time of nascent national conflict. Especially in the wake of the Young Turk revolution, these conceptual divisions informed the Yishuv's language, music, celebrations, public spaces, economic and political orientations, immigration policy, and even bodily comportment.Less
Continuing with the theme of Orient and Occident in Zionist culture, this chapter examines the ways in which competing conceptions helped determine the role of Oriental Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the emerging Hebrew nationhood. Arguing against a historiography that correlates Zionism with an oversimplified version of European Orientalism, the chapter contends that, within Zionist culture, a myth of Sephardic supremacy coexisted with a sense of Ashkenazi superiority to shape the roles envisioned for the nation's Jewish ethnic groups. Similarly, romantic images of Arabs as racial counterparts and as models for the new Hebrews clashed with a view of the Arab as primitive and responsible for the land's desolation in a time of nascent national conflict. Especially in the wake of the Young Turk revolution, these conceptual divisions informed the Yishuv's language, music, celebrations, public spaces, economic and political orientations, immigration policy, and even bodily comportment.
Derek B. Scott
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195151961
- eISBN:
- 9780199870394
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151961.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
This book is an attempt to decode, explain, and account for the way that social meaning in music is perceived. It is concerned throughout with the socially constituted values of musical styles, and ...
More
This book is an attempt to decode, explain, and account for the way that social meaning in music is perceived. It is concerned throughout with the socially constituted values of musical styles, and contains a collection of wide-ranging chapters exploring aspects of sound and meaning, production and status, dissemination and reception, and criticism and aesthetics. Each chapter considers the workings of a particular relationship between ideology and musical style, offering different perspectives on how ideas are communicated through music. The book illustrates how musical styles construct ideas of class, sexuality, and ethnic identity. In doing so, it is concerned to demonstrate how such constructions relate to particular stylistic codes in particular cultural and historical contexts. The book is divided into four parts, covering the areas of gender and sexuality, ideology in relation to popular music, the sacred and profane, and ideology and cultural identity. The subjects debated include erotic representation from Monteverdi to Mae West, the sexual politics of 19th-century musical aesthetics, the Native American in popular music, the sacred and the demonic, Orientalism, and the initial impact of African-American music-making on the European classical tradition. The book's arguments are supported by ninety musical examples taken from such diverse sources as baroque and romantic opera, symphonic music, jazz, and 19th- and 20th-century popular songs.Less
This book is an attempt to decode, explain, and account for the way that social meaning in music is perceived. It is concerned throughout with the socially constituted values of musical styles, and contains a collection of wide-ranging chapters exploring aspects of sound and meaning, production and status, dissemination and reception, and criticism and aesthetics. Each chapter considers the workings of a particular relationship between ideology and musical style, offering different perspectives on how ideas are communicated through music. The book illustrates how musical styles construct ideas of class, sexuality, and ethnic identity. In doing so, it is concerned to demonstrate how such constructions relate to particular stylistic codes in particular cultural and historical contexts. The book is divided into four parts, covering the areas of gender and sexuality, ideology in relation to popular music, the sacred and profane, and ideology and cultural identity. The subjects debated include erotic representation from Monteverdi to Mae West, the sexual politics of 19th-century musical aesthetics, the Native American in popular music, the sacred and the demonic, Orientalism, and the initial impact of African-American music-making on the European classical tradition. The book's arguments are supported by ninety musical examples taken from such diverse sources as baroque and romantic opera, symphonic music, jazz, and 19th- and 20th-century popular songs.
Ussama Makdisi
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520218451
- eISBN:
- 9780520922792
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520218451.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
Focusing on Ottoman Lebanon, this book shows how sectarianism was a manifestation of modernity that transcended the physical boundaries of a particular country. It challenges those who have viewed ...
More
Focusing on Ottoman Lebanon, this book shows how sectarianism was a manifestation of modernity that transcended the physical boundaries of a particular country. It challenges those who have viewed sectarian violence as an Islamic response to Westernization or simply as a product of social and economic inequities among religious groups. The religious violence of the nineteenth century, which culminated in sectarian mobilizations and massacres in 1860, was a complex, multilayered, subaltern expression of modernization, not a primordial reaction to it. The author argues that sectarianism represented a deliberate mobilization of religious identities for political and social purposes. The Ottoman reform movement, launched in 1839, and the growing European presence in the Middle East, contributed to the disintegration of the traditional Lebanese social order based on a hierarchy that bridged religious differences. The book highlights how European colonialism and Orientalism, with their emphasis on Christian salvation and Islamic despotism, and Ottoman and local nationalisms, each created and used narratives of sectarianism as foils to their own visions of modernity, and to their own projects of colonial, imperial, and national development. It is important to our understanding of Lebanese society today, but also makes a significant contribution to the discussion of the importance of religious discourse in the formation and dissolution of social and national identities in the modern world.Less
Focusing on Ottoman Lebanon, this book shows how sectarianism was a manifestation of modernity that transcended the physical boundaries of a particular country. It challenges those who have viewed sectarian violence as an Islamic response to Westernization or simply as a product of social and economic inequities among religious groups. The religious violence of the nineteenth century, which culminated in sectarian mobilizations and massacres in 1860, was a complex, multilayered, subaltern expression of modernization, not a primordial reaction to it. The author argues that sectarianism represented a deliberate mobilization of religious identities for political and social purposes. The Ottoman reform movement, launched in 1839, and the growing European presence in the Middle East, contributed to the disintegration of the traditional Lebanese social order based on a hierarchy that bridged religious differences. The book highlights how European colonialism and Orientalism, with their emphasis on Christian salvation and Islamic despotism, and Ottoman and local nationalisms, each created and used narratives of sectarianism as foils to their own visions of modernity, and to their own projects of colonial, imperial, and national development. It is important to our understanding of Lebanese society today, but also makes a significant contribution to the discussion of the importance of religious discourse in the formation and dissolution of social and national identities in the modern world.
Sujit Sivasundaram
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780197265413
- eISBN:
- 9780191760464
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197265413.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
This chapter studies a particular moment in the emergence of the idea of the ‘native’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By considering the role played by Pacific islanders, ...
More
This chapter studies a particular moment in the emergence of the idea of the ‘native’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By considering the role played by Pacific islanders, Asians, and Africans in defining territorial identities, bonds of attachment to rulers, and patterns of settlement prior to contact with colonists, it argues that the ‘native’ emerged partly out of extant traditions. The British empire recontextualized mutating extant senses of culture in global maps of heritage and thus minted a new sense of the ‘native’. Throughout this process, what appears is not an unproblematic concept of the ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’, but a notion of how claims of a separate heritage arose in contexts of hybridity and creolization.Less
This chapter studies a particular moment in the emergence of the idea of the ‘native’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By considering the role played by Pacific islanders, Asians, and Africans in defining territorial identities, bonds of attachment to rulers, and patterns of settlement prior to contact with colonists, it argues that the ‘native’ emerged partly out of extant traditions. The British empire recontextualized mutating extant senses of culture in global maps of heritage and thus minted a new sense of the ‘native’. Throughout this process, what appears is not an unproblematic concept of the ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’, but a notion of how claims of a separate heritage arose in contexts of hybridity and creolization.
