After Orientalism

The debate on Orientalism began some fifty years ago in the wake of decolonization. While initially considered a turning point, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was in fact part of a larger academic endeavor – the political critique of “colonial science” – that had already significantly impacted the humanities and social sciences. In a recent attempt to broaden the debate, the papers collected in this volume, offered at various seminars and an international symposium held in Paris in 2010-2011, critically examine whether Orientalism, as knowledge and as creative expression, was in fact fundamentally subservient to Western domination. By raising new issues, the papers shift the focus from the center to the peripheries, thus analyzing the impact on local societies of a major intellectual and institutional movement that necessarily changed not only their world, but the ways in which they represented their world. World history, which assumes a plurality of perspectives, leads us to observe that the Saidian critique applies to powers other than Western European ones — three case studies are considered here: the Ottoman, Russian (and Soviet), and Chinese empires. Other essays in this volume proceed to analyze how post-independence states have made use of the tremendous accumulation of knowledge and representations inherited from previous colonial regimes for the sake of national identity, as well as how scholars change and adapt what was once a hegemonic discourse for their own purposes. What emerges is a new landscape in which to situate research on non-Western cultures and societies, and a road-map leading readers beyond the restrictive dichotomy of a confrontation between West and East. With contributions by: Elisabeth Allès; Léon Buskens; Stéphane A. Dudoignon; Baudouin Dupret; Edhem Eldem; Olivier Herrenschmidt; Nicholas S. Hopkins; Robert Irwin; Mouldi Lahmar; Sylvette Larzul; Jean-Gabriel Leturcq; Jessica Marglin; Claire Nicholas; Emmanuelle Perrin; Alain de Pommereau; François Pouillon; Zakaria Rhani; Emmanuel Szurek; Jean-Claude Vatin; Mercedes Volait

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.

How does Edward Said’s Orientalism speak to us today? What relevance did and does it have politically and intellectually? How and in what modes does Orientalism engage with new, intersecting fields of inquiry?At the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Orientalism these questions shape the essays collected in the present volume. The “after” of the title does not only guide the contributions in a look on past discussions, but specifically points at future research as well. Orientalism’s critical entanglements are thus connected to productive looks; these productive looks make us read differently, but only after we recognize our struggle with the dominant notions that we live by, that divide and unite us. More specifically, this volume addresses three fields of research enabling productive looks: visual culture; the body, sexuality and the performative; and national identities, modernity and gender. All articles, weaving delicate, new analytical and theoretical textures, maintain vital links with at least two of the fields mentioned. Orientalism’s role as a cultural catalyst is gauged in the analysis of materials such as Iranian film, 16th and 17th century Venetian representations of “the Turk,” Barthes’ take on Japanese culture, modern Arab travel narratives, Palestinian popular culture, photography on and of the Maghreb, Japanese queer and gay culture, the 19th century Illustrated London News, theories on migration and exile, postcolonial cinema, and Hanan al-Shaykh’s and Mai Ghoussoub’s writing on civil war in Lebanon.Authors include: Karina Eileraas, Belgin Turan Özkaya, Joshua Paul Dale, John Potvin, Mark McLelland, Tina Sherwell, Nasrin Rahimieh, Stephen Morton, Anastasia Vallasopoulos, Suha Kudsieh and Kate McInturff.

How does Edward Said's Orientalism speak to us today? What relevance did and does it have politically and intellectually? How and in what modes does Orientalism engage with new, intersecting fields of inquiry? At the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Orientalism these questions shape the essays collected in the present volume. The "after" of the title does not only guide the contributions in a look on past discussions, but specifically points at future research as well. Orientalism's critical entanglements are thus connected to productive looks; these productive looks make us read differently, but only after we recognize our struggle with the dominant notions that we live by, that divide and unite us. More specifically, this volume addresses three fields of research enabling productive looks: visual culture; the body, sexuality and the performative; and national identities, modernity and gender. All articles, weaving delicate, new analytical and theoretical textures, maintain vital links with at least two of the fields mentioned. Orientalism's role as a cultural catalyst is gauged in the analysis of materials such as Iranian film, 16th and 17th century Venetian representations of "the Turk," Barthes' take on Japanese culture, modern Arab travel narratives, Palestinian popular culture, photography on and of the Maghreb, Japanese queer and gay culture, the 19th century Illustrated London News, theories on migration and exile, postcolonial cinema, and Hanan al-Shaykh's and Mai Ghoussoub's writing on civil war in Lebanon. Authors include: Karina Eileraas, Belgin Turan Özkaya, Joshua Paul Dale, John Potvin, Mark McLelland, Tina Sherwell, Nasrin Rahimieh, Stephen Morton, Anastasia Vallasopoulos, Suha Kudsieh and Kate McInturff.

This collection offers a postcolonial critique of the ostensible superiority or originality of ‘Western’ political theory and one of its fundamental concepts, ‘citizenship’. The chapters analyse the undoing, uncovering, and reinventing of citizenship as a way of investigating citizenship as political subjectivity. If it has now become very difficult to imagine citizenship merely as nationality or membership in the nation-state, this is at least in part because of the anticolonial struggles and the project of reimagining citizenship after orientalism that they precipitated. If it has become difficult to sustain the orientalist assumption, the question arises; how do we investigate citizenship as political subjectivity after orientalism? This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

This edited volume presents a critique of citizenship as exclusively and even originally a European or 'Western' institution. It explores the ways in which we may begin to think differently about citizenship as political subjectivity.

Douglas Little explores the stormy American relationship with the Middle East from World War II through the war in Iraq, focusing particularly on the complex and often inconsistent attitudes and interests that helped put the United States on a collision course with radical Islam early in the new millennium. After documenting the persistence of "orientalist" stereotypes in American popular culture, Little examines oil, Israel, and other aspects of U.S. policy. He concludes that a peculiar blend of arrogance and ignorance has led American officials to overestimate their ability to shape events in the Middle East from 1945 through the present day, and that it has been a driving force behind the Iraq war. For this updated third edition, Little covers events through 2007, including a new chapter on the Bush Doctrine, demonstrating that in many important ways, George W. Bush's Middle Eastern policies mark a sharp break with the past.

This second edition considers how the 'global war on terror' has changed the way the West views the Islamic world.