Rethinking Orientalism

Catalog description

Scholars have argued that since the “fall” of Byzantine Constantinople to the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, Western European intellectuals have framed cultural difference in terms of the “East” and the “West.” Renaissance humanists, for example, resorted to ancient and medieval texts to create a religiously and culturally defined “other”—the “Ottoman Turks.” Their writings then spread across Europe and generated problematic conceptualizations of what the West ought to be, as different from the East. This is by no means an isolated case: in the nineteenth century, for example, we begin encountering systematic categorizations of peoples imbued with discourses of civilizations. Critic Edward Said identifies such problematic representations of the so-called East as “Orientalism” and offers a productive category to analyze how such representations have informed power relations and policies. This seminar will examine a wide variety of cultural representations pertaining to the modern Middle East that have contributed to the "East/West" divide conceptualized as Orientalism. We will explore politics of cultural representation in such fields as cinema, literature, visual culture, political economy, and humanitarianism. Some questions we will address: What are the politics of cultural representation over (at least) the last two centuries that have marked modern day politics? How do such representations lend themselves to problematic interpretations of East and West in general, and the Middle East in particular? What are the racial, historical, and cultural implications of these representations and the policies that they inform?