Abstract
Nobody should be allowed to remain innocent of Orientalism. More than 30 years after its publication in 1978, the book continues to be indispensable for understanding East-West relations. Orientalism has elicited, and withstood, a host of attacks, some more damaging than others. Yet it has transformed academic history writing concerning the Middle East. The field of postcolonial studies and the critique of imperialism within literary and cultural history would be unthinkable without it. The book is not a history of Western Orientalist scholarship. Still less is it a history of the ‘East.’ Although written during the 1970s, Orientalism endures because it retains a powerful purchase on the world we inhabit. What is most troubling about the book’s continuing relevance is that despite its sensational exposure of Western errors of perception, representation and policy concerning the Middle East, the discourse of Orientalism, the discursive machine for constructing an Orient, making statements about it, and ruling over it, continues apace. The book has endured, tragically, because its object of critique is so robust; Orientalism remains relevant precisely because Orientalism continues to prevail.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 2005), vii.
Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5.
Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978) (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 3.
Said, ‘Literary Theory at the Crossroads of Public Life,’ in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan, 63–93. (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 78.
Carter Vaughn Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 218.
Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558–1713 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 197.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987).
Om Prakash and Manish Chakraborti, Europeans in Bengal in the Pre-Colonial Period: A Brief History of Their Commercial and Cultural Legacy (New Delhi: Embassy of the Netherlands, 2008); William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: HarperCollins, 2002).
Philip Mansel, ‘The French Renaissance in Search of the Ottoman Empire,’ in Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East, ed. Gerald MacLean, 96–107. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 96.
Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade, and the Struggle for Land, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 21.
Jonathan I. Israel, ‘The Emerging Empire: The Continental Perspective, 1650–1713,’ in The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume I, ed. Nicholas Canny, 423–44. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 423.
Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11.
Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 16.
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576– 1626, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3.
Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), xii, quoted in Barbour, Before Orientalism, 198, n. 9.
Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 39. See also Daniel J. Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean, Early Modern Cultural Studies Series (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); and Matthew Birchwood, Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640–1685, Studies in Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer of Boydell & Brewer, 2007).
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.
Gerald MacLean, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 20.
For excellent work on the problematics of cosmopolitanism, and on Said’s exemplary move toward greater ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’ after Orientalism, see Robert Spencer, Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–7, 18–39, 163–90. For a reading of the Ottoman Islamic spectre still haunting Europe, and advocacy of a democratic cosmopolitanism requiring a vision of unconditional hospitality, see Meyda Yegenoglu, Islam, Migrancy and Hospitality in Europe (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7, 9.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years (1995; London: Black Swan, 1996), 220; quoted in Caroline Finkel, ‘“The Treacherous Cleverness of Hindsight”: Myths of Ottoman Decay,’ in Re-Orienting the Renaissance, ed. Gerald MacLean, 148–74. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 165. The definitive study is now Giancarlo Casale’s brilliant The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Colin Imber, Ebu’s-su’ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 6–69.
Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (London: John Murray, 2005), 88.
Benjamin Arbel, Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean (New York: E. V. Brill, 1995), 176, quoted in Burton, Traffic, 201.
Burton, Traffic, 200, quoting Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 23; see also David S. Katz, Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Raja Shehadeh, A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle (London: Profile, 2011).
Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant …(London: Printed by I. L. [John Legatt] for Andrew Crooke, 1636), 4, 5. For the best study of Blount, see Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 117–76.
Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992), 11, quoting Istakhari and Ibn Hankal, in Guy Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D. 650 to 1500 Translated from the Works of the Medieval Arab Geographers (1890; rpt Beirut: Khayati, 1965), 28, and George Sandys, from Richard Bevis, ‘Making the Desert Bloom: An Historical Picture of Pre-Zionist Palestine,’ The Middle East Newsletter 5, no. 2 (February-March 1971), 4.
Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 2002).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Donna Landry
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Landry, D. (2013). Said before Said. In: Elmarsafy, Z., Bernard, A., Attwell, D. (eds) Debating Orientalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341112_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341112_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33817-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-34111-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)