Accidental Orientalists

This is the first monograph in English to address Orientalism in the writings of Italian travellers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to do against a backdrop of comparative reference to works in English and French that preceded or were contemporary to them.

Focusing on the field of study known as orientalism in the decades around 1900, this volume explores the history of the humanities through the prism of scholarly personae.

Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History 21 (CMR 21), covering South-western Europe in the period 1800-1914, is a further volume in a general history of relations between the two faiths from the 7th century to the early 20th century. It comprises a series of introductory essays and the main body of detailed entries. These treat all the works, surviving or lost, that have been recorded. They provide biographical details of the authors, descriptions and assessments of the works themselves, and complete accounts of manuscripts, editions, translations and studies. The result of collaboration between numerous new and established scholars, CMR 21, along with the other volumes in this series, is intended as a fundamental tool for research in Christian-Muslim relations. Section Editors: Ines Aščerić-Todd, Clinton Bennett, Luis F. Bernabé Pons, Jaco Beyers, Emanuele Colombo, Lejla Demiri, Martha T. Frederiks, David D. Grafton, Stanisław Grodź, Alan M. Guenther, Vincenzo Lavenia, Arely Medina, Diego Melo Carrasco, Alain Messaoudi, Gordon Nickel, Claire Norton, Reza Pourjavady, Douglas Pratt, Charles Ramsey, Peter Riddell, Umar Ryad, Cornelia Soldat, Charles Tieszen, Carsten Walbiner, Catherina Wenzel.

For much of the twentieth century the Mediterranean was a colonized sea. Italy's Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean (1895-1945) reintegrates Italy, one of the least studied imperial states, into the history of European colonialism. It takes a critical approach to the concept of the Mediterranean in the period of Italian expansion and examines how within and through the Mediterranean Italians navigated issues of race, nation and migration troubling them at home as well as transnational questions about sovereignty, identity, and national belonging created by the decline and collapse of the Ottoman empire in North Africa, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean, or Levant. While most studies of Italian colonialism center on the encounter in Africa, Italy's Sea describes another set of colonial identities that accrued in and around the Aegean region of the Mediterranean, ones linked not to resettlement projects or to the rhetoric of reclaiming Roman empire, but to cosmopolitan imaginaries of Magna Graecia, the medieval Christian crusades, the Venetian and Genoese maritime empires, and finally, of religious diversity and transnational Levantine Jewish communities that could help render cultural and political connections between the Italian nation at home and the overseas empire in the Mediterranean. Using postcolonial critique to interpret local archival and oral sources as well as Italian colonial literature, film, architecture, and urban planning, the book brings to life a history of mediterraneita or Mediterraneanness in Italian culture, one with both liberal and fascist associations, and enriches our understanding of how contemporary Italy-as well as Greece-may imagine their relationships to Europe and the Mediterranean today. --

This book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant opening of Japan's relations with the West. Drawing from the fields of Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, analysis of these texts explores one central question: what does it mean to imagine Japanese culture as contributing to Italian culture? Each author shares in common an attempt to disrupt ideas about dichotomies and unbalanced power relationships between East and West. Proposing the notion of 'relational Orientalism, ' this book suggests that Italian travelogues to Japan, in many cases, pursued the goal of building imaginary transnational communities, predicated on commonalities and integration, by claiming what they perceived as 'Oriental' as their own. In contrast with a long history of Western representations of Japan as inferior and irrational, Searching for Japan identifies a positive overarching attitude toward the Far East country in modern Italian culture. Expanding the horizon of Italian transnational networks, normally situated within the Southern European region, this book reinstates the existence of an alternative Euro-Asian axis, operating across Italian history.

This guide provides an overview of the thematic areas, analytical aspects, and avenues of research which, together, form a broader conversation around doing spatial history. Spatial history is not a field with clearly delineated boundaries. For the most part, it lacks a distinct, unambiguous scholarly identity. It can only be thought of in relation to other, typically more established fields. Indeed, one of the most valuable utilities of spatial history is its capacity to facilitate conversations across those fields. Consequently, it must be discussed in relation to a variety of historiographical contexts. Each of these have their own intellectual genealogies, institutional settings, and conceptual path dependencies. With this in mind, this guide surveys the following areas: territoriality, infrastructure, and borders; nature, environment, and landscape; city and home; social space and political protest; spaces of knowledge; spatial imaginaries; cartographic representations; and historical GIS research.

The history of Italian culture stems from multiple experiences of mobility and migration, which have produced a range of narratives, inside and outside Italy. This collection interrogates the dynamic nature of Italian identity and culture, focussing on the concepts and practices of mobility, memory and translation. It adopts a transnational perspective, offering a fresh approach to the study of Italy and of Modern Languages.

More than three decades after its first publication, Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East has become a modern classic. In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.