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Over his lifetime (c. 1890–1954), the Algerian painter and administrator Azouaou Mammeri traced an impressive transcolonial geography that simultaneously revealed the limits and possibilities for colonised subjects to enact agency within a colonial system. Mammeri's physical and figurative movements between Algeria, Morocco, and France, between 'fine arts' and 'native arts' worlds, and between colonised subject and colonial administrator also indicated a transgression of boundaries of identity, race, and power. This was something that contemporary French colonial officials and arts critics observed and commented upon, often with deep ambivalence: how to accommodate someone like Mammeri in ways that did not fundamentally trouble or upend the rigid and hierarchical categories of the French Empire? In this article, I take Mammeri's mobility as a case study for liminal subjects who alternately challenged or were absorbed into colonial systems predicated on European supremacy, and consider the ways in which Mammeri's agency, racial positioning, and personal 'merit' shaped the dynamic of his movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focused on the Japanese cyber-fandom of Thai boys' love (BL) dramas, examining how their perception of Thailand was transformed through viewership and participation in fandom activities and how it affected the fans themselves and the broader Japanese society. In the Japanese cyberfandom of Thai BL dramas, people with diverse gender identities and sexualities intermingle, learn, and become aware of their changing gazes toward Thai and Japanese culture, queerness, and other related issues. Through a qualitative analysis of audience ethnography and interviews with 25 participants, this study shows that Thailand's culture contrasts with others, particularly the cultures of the West, and an Oriental gaze from the Japanese point of view has emerged in this context. A movement beyond the national Thailand–Japan framework has also emerged, which explores the multifaceted nature of BL dramas within a single-issue context. Thus, Thai BL drama fandom extends beyond an Oriental perspective, practising inter-Asian referencing and reflecting on the national framework by watching BL dramas and participating in fandom. In other words, this study presents new possibilities for BL: (1) overcoming an oriental perspective and reflecting on a national framework for the acceptance and consumption of BL content and (2) cultural experience and real social connection through fandom activities and discourse through inter-Asian referencing in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Henry Wigmore's life experience as a Westerniser teaching Anglo-American Law in Japan from 1889 to 1892 is an example of legal orientalism. Engaging in the historical study of Japanese law despite diverging cultural paradigms between East and West paradoxically revealed striking similarities leading to the publication of the Materials for Study of Private Law in Old Japan in 1892. More than three decades after his return from Tokyo sparking a lasting fascination for foreign and comparative law, Wigmore published in 1928 A Panorama of the World's Legal Systems. This case study offers insights on the relationship between legal history and comparative law that these publications respectively represent. The imprecise classification of A Panorama at a time when comparative law was at its infancy stage requires identifying a relevant taxonomy. Wigmore's legacy is revisited with a focus on both its historical and comparative dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intellectual ‘invention of Iran’ is a potent image that owes its birth to the Orientalist practice of archaeology and historiography from the mid-19th to the latter 20th century: an intellectual enterprise that originated from the myth of Aryan race theory, the hypothesis of Aryan migration to the Indian subcontinent, and the subsequent positioning of Persian ethnie to be the sole author of Iran’s ‘glorious national past’. This Eurocentric narration has given rise to ‘Persianness’ as an ethnoracial form of supremacy akin to the role of Whiteness in Europe and the US. In this article, I not only examine the epistemic foundations of Iranian nationalism but, more importantly, show how the enduring legacy of the Orientalist interpretation of Iran’s past animates the work of contemporary Persian scholars and elites. I argue that the historical construction of Persianness as a privileged identity has essentialised seeing, thinking, knowing, and speaking like a Persian and thereby presented it as a natural order of things. This raciolinguistic invention sustains a habitus that perceives and treats the non-Persian histories and memories only through the lens of Persianness – in which they are by definition less-than. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following critiques of secularism, feminist theory and literary analysis, this article revisits the much interpreted yet never exhausted Arabic masterpiece, the Cairo Trilogy (1956–1957), by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006). The Cairo Trilogy depicts the lives of the middle-class ʿAbd al-Jawād family in colonial Cairo during the interwar period amidst the process of modernization and national uprising against British colonial domination. Scholars have considered the relations in the Jawādī family through a patriarchal lens via the perspective of the son Kamāl, the protagonist who represents the secular Arab intellectual. This study, instead, follows Amīna, the mother of the family, and her relationship to her two sons, Kamāl and Fahmy, to explore the different options and various relations between the religious and the secular in this colonial context. By reading the Jawādī family this way, this article uncovers the orientalist-secular construction of religion and religious ways of resistance despite colonial disruptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gastronomic tourism is a developed research stream in tourism studies. Previous literature, however, has mainly shed light either on the micro-context of food itself or on meso-contexts such as heritage and regional food sourcing. Given this situation, previous research has called for examining this aspect of food tourism, aptly named the 'cultural turn' in food tourism. This paper adds to extant theoretical conversations by studying popular international gastronomic tourism videos. As the world becomes increasingly globalized and cultural products suffuse across borders, travellers, particularly those from the Global North, sample and judge local cuisine and this incurs reactions from onlookers. Watched by millions of people, vlogs provide a virtual immersive socio-cultural experience to a tourist site. In this regard, this article asks the following research question: how does the Global North-South divide manifest in vlogged gastronomic tours and what responses do such phenomena provoke among international audiences? Using the approaches of textual analysis, content analysis and sentiment analysis, this study explores the afore-mentioned research question using the canvas of nine gastronomic vlogging tours as played out on YouTube. The authors analyse the most popular food vlogs of all time and use a gamut of more than three hours of video (with more than 215 million views) and more than 128,000 comments. The results show how vlogs may provide authentic cultural experiences and how the Global North-South divide is ameliorated through vlogging gastronomic tours. The question is important not only helpful for guiding destination marketers and tourism service providers about the multifaceted aspects of a destination, but also for understanding how particular social phenomena can foster connections among different peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly has long been viewed in Japan and abroad as demeaning Japan, portraying Japanese women as helpless victims of a cruel society, easily exploited by Japanese and American men. But a remarkable 1948 production by two Japanese men, Fujiwara Yoshie (1898–1976) and Aoyama Yoshio (1903–1976), reimagined the typical Euro-American staging to display their vision of a 'real' Japan, one they also believed most faithful to Puccini. Not only did their production mute the inequities present in the opera; it was initiated, funded, and fully supported by the US Troop Information and Education (TI&E) Section in Tokyo. Ultimately, the Fujiwara and Aoyama interpretation became the dominant staging of the opera worldwide for decades to come. Exploring the institutional, political, and popular interest in Madama Butterfly in occupied Japan, this article examines how this 1948 production bolstered the Cold War narrative of the US as a non-colonialist, democratizing power striving to liberate Japanese women while celebrating Japan's 'return' to its native aesthetic traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of affect center the porous non-enclosure of bodies and psyches, and temporality is crucial to our interpretations of violence, loss, rebellion, and change. The authors in this issue collectively demonstrate the inadequacy of colonialist and masculinist notions of static self-sovereign subjects in political theology. While affectability is frequently invoked for racialized and gendered modes of demonization or dismissal, the contributors to this special issue show the key role that it also plays in transforming power relations. The essays differ in the extent to which they foreground religious communities and practice, relations to nation-states, and divine or non-human agency. Together, however, they loosen assumptions about affect that limit visions for living otherwise and point to moments where we might glimpse such possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lead up to the 23 June 2016 democratic divorce of the United Kingdom from the European Union observed rigorous campaigning from the ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ spectrums. Immigration was high on the agenda, with UKIP’s leave campaign commissioning seven visuals focusing on migration from Turkey, with this anti-immigration rhetoric receiving much criticism. This study analysed these visuals by performing a semiotic and visual frame analysis. The findings present important indications of how politicians utilize existing connotations and ‘othering’ ideologies to influence political decisions, and the messages in accordance with the socio-political climate prevalent at the time. It was found that the visuals relied heavily on connotations appropriated upon the Turkish identity, and their previously invested-in self-other ideologies, enabling the visuals to transcend a greater message. Simultaneously, pre-existing antagonism connected to immigration was also utilized within a setting of political distrust. The rhetoric promoted basing Brexit on Turkey’s entrance to the Union, omitting the Union from the equation and question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1934 the renowned Iraqi-Jewish musician Ezra Aharon/Azuri Effendi moved to Palestine, then under the British Mandate, where he became a prominent cultural figure who networked and intersected with a variety of agents—British authorities, Zionists, Palestinians, and a German musicologist specialising in ‘Oriental’ music. The correspondences, concert programmes, notes and musical works found in Ezra Aharon’s recently catalogued personal archive, alongside press articles, reveal the sociocultural tensions embedded in the on-the-ground encounter between ‘East’ and ‘West’ occurring in Mandate Palestine. The life story, musical activities and cultural spaces occupied by Azuri Effendi, provide a means of charting how ‘the Orient’ has been musically constructed by different agents, the shifting roles of Arab Jews in this trajectory, and the agency that musical practice brings to this terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we deploy a critical framework based on Edward Said's concept of Orientalism to offer novel insights into the 2014 judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Elisabeta Dano, Florian Dano v Jobcenter Leipzig (Dano). The potency of seeing the Dano case through an Orientalist lens lies with its ability to unearth and unpack the (internal) othering processes that run through the Court's narrative and shape its ruling - processes that persist to this day. Our novel and distinctive engagement with the Dano judgment notably shows that the othering of ‘poor’ economically inactive mobile EU citizens is enmeshed in ‘Western’ Europe's construction of ‘Eastern’ Europe. Adopting an Orientalist perspective allows us to recognise the existence of ‘internal others’ within the EU and acknowledge that EU citizenship as a (more) inclusive experience for all Member State nationals has not (yet) materialised. Critically, this approach shows that the EU will not be able to move towards greater inclusiveness in the practice of EU citizenship unless and until its ‘internal others’ become visible and their othering is understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital streaming services are dominating global media, yet little research exists studying them as functions of multi-billion-dollar conglomerates that shape culture. Disney+ launched in 2019 and within three months had 30 million subscribers, ushering in what the company called a “new era” of media. However, Disney+ relies on its parent media conglomerate’s film catalog, some of it racist, meaning the “new era” is anything but. This paper examines Disney+ to further explore one conglomerate-owned streaming service and shows, through an analysis of corporate records and trade publications using a political economy lens informed by Orientalism, how Disney+ positions itself as the future of media yet relies on “classic” content to fill consumer demand. This work extends a structural critique of Disney+ to show how “classic” racist content on the streaming platform of the future constructs a world of racism online that exists in perpetuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the supposed geopolitics of Enlightenment secularism in a case study on the European Enlightenment’s reception of Ibn Ṭufayl’s classical work, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (Alive, Son of Awake). It demonstrates how, by appropriating the tropes, literary techniques, and fictional setting of the Islamic “original,” Christian (Protestant) culture began unknowingly inventing its own patterns of secular thought. It argues then that to the pantheistic Enlightenment’s transsecular approach this tale, allegorically depicting Islamic philosophy’s (falsafa) independence from religious orthodoxy and its perfection in mystical wisdom (tasawwuf), offered both a conception of truth and of the Orient that might have felt very familiar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on Orientalist representations of Islam and/or Muslims has been rampant in academic literature since Edward Said’s publication of his seminal work Orientalism (1978). The articulation of this discourse however has transformed in due course. It has manifested into its new variant ‘neo-Orientalism’, which has gained prominence in the post-9/11 era. In this paper, I discuss the transition from Orientalism to neo-Orientalism, and argue that this new mode of representation does not exclusively result from the 9/11 events and the subsequent War on Terror, but also from the portrayals of Muslims in the last quarter of the twentieth century. These portrayals, disseminated with great intensity by people in the media, journalists, politicians, and Orientalist academics, as well as in literary and cultural productions, continue to reify narratives about Islam and Muslim societies. This paper concludes with the dynamics Orientalism holds and reveals the role authors of the Middle East and South Asia play in disseminating neo-Orientalist discourses with the often-detrimental effect of catering to and promoting modern-day Islamophobia in contemporary Western societies. This is briefly illustrated on the examples of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), Qaisra Shahraz’s The Holy Woman (2001), and Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how native strangeness is produced alongside native-settler, insider-outsider frictions in Indonesia. While peculiar cultural stereotypes of Indigenous others cannot be separated from Orientalism, which follows the unequal power relations established by colonialism, another dynamic that brings about these stereotypes are the messy encounters between Indigenous people and migrants. The constantly expanding circuit of extractive capital brings disciplined bodies to resource frontiers, which intermingle with local peoples in circumstances that do not allow for proper understanding of each other. However, the strange and dangerous images of Indigenous people do not only circulate among settlers, but are also employed by Indigenous communities to negotiate, vent their grievances, or assert their autonomy, especially in the years since decentralization and the massive wave of local-migrant conflicts in 1999. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sindhi nationalist historiography is a classic case of how to read historical, archaeological, and political texts of importance to justify the present-day modernist ideologies premised on excluding marginalized sections of society. This essay interrogates the Sindhi nationalist literati elite's epistemic neglect of the underprivileged caste's lifeworld. That disregard reflects in their literary and political writings that arguably rely on the British Orientalist historiography to construct the myth of caste-neutral and egalitarian culture of Sufi Sindh. It traces the historicisation of the claim of Hindu–Muslim interfaith harmony, and its persistence in the post-Partition Sindh. Based on the content analysis of progressive literature and the historiography of progressive politics in Sindh, it is concluded that owing to the casteist social structural barriers the privileged caste elite at the vanguard of progressive nationalist politics was blinded by their own privileged position to justly address the caste question. That inherent blindness to see through the problem of caste is the reason that progressives' emancipatory projects to redefine the past and myths end in failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-9/11 and 7/7 era in Britain, Muslim subjects have been racially labelled as non-white, equated with a security threat. Similarly, within Turkey's secular public sphere, Muslims are portrayed as anti-modern and illiberal. This prompts some British Turkish Muslims, descendants of immigrant Turks, to strategically embrace white, European identities. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, this article reveals how 'whiteness' is a privileged category that certain Turkish Muslims adopt or align with to counter Islamophobia. Following Hall's racism framework and Gramsci's ideas, the paper underscores how British Turks sustain and propagate 'whiteness' to assimilate into society and evade racialisation challenges faced by other Muslims. Importantly, the article interprets the adoption of hegemonic white identities not just as a response to British Islamophobia but also as a manifestation of a secular Turkish Orientalism, depicting Islam as a backward, illiberal, and irrational religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tibetan Buddhism has played a shifting role in the official identity discourse of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan. Established for the administration of Tibet, Mongolia, and other frontier regions in 1928, the ROC's Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission (MTAC) continued research and publication activity on Taiwan (1949–2017). A major focus of this work was Tibetan Buddhism. This article examines how MTAC portrayals of Tibetan Buddhism evolved in response to changes in the ROC's legitimating ideology and to Taiwan's shifting political and cultural context. During the martial law era (1949–1987), Tibetan Buddhism was largely portrayed as an exotic religion facing brutal Communist oppression. By the twenty-first century, the MTAC was repositioning itself as a supporter of Tibetan Buddhism within Taiwan. MTAC discourse on Tibetan Buddhism reflects both the growing detachment of ROC politics from Mainland affairs and the persistence of Orientalist views of Tibetans and their culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay underscores the importance of seeking refuge in literary aesthetics by arguing that Goethe's concept of world literature was formulated in compensation for the shock of military defeat, political collapse, and foreign occupation. The refugee became a figure of identification in Goethe's writing in the 1790s and his Orientalist Nachdichtungen. The Goethean mode of reading distant literatures entails identifying with other writers who are often already marginalized within their own cultures. This manner of engaging with non-European texts refuses to establish a pantheon of great works precisely because it relies on a writerly interest in rediscovering one's own identity by reading foreign literature from a position of insecurity and weakness. The goal of reading is always the reconstruction of the self through a strange text. With its eagerness to establish a monumental cultural figure, the nineteenth and early twentieth-century canon marginalized precisely those unGerman texts in which Goethe most effectively dismantled his own authorial status. Only with the demise of colonial empires and the defeat of Nazi Germany did a more modest, anti-hegemonic mode of reading remerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Founded in 1926 by a group of mainly German-Jewish Orientalists, the Hebrew University's School of Oriental Studies in Jerusalem was the primary site of the university's efforts to achieve 'rapprochement' with Arab and Muslim scholars in the Middle East. Using previously unpublished archival material in German, Arabic, Hebrew and English, this article exposes the School's endeavours in the first decade after its establishment to promote this goal, focusing on the attempts to recruit an Arab member to its ranks. Led by the School's founder Josef Horovitz, these attempts were ultimately unsuccessful as a result of the inherent contradictions in its existence: an institute whose members are inflexibly committed to the German Orientalist legacy of a philological discipline now transplanted into the living Orient; and an aspired intellectual bridge between Jews and Arabs, built within a Zionist framework limiting its ability to attract local non-Jewish scholars. Following this failure, it was ultimately an Aleppo Jew, Isaac Shamosh, who was recruited to fill this role, his hybrid Arab-Jewish identity meant to bridge this politicalcultural gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Re-orientalism is one of the under-researched issues in Cultural Studies. It is usually eclipsed by the upsurge of interest in Diaspora Criticism, which dwells mainly on the significance of human dialogue and cultural reconciliation. The present article aims to explore the re-Orientalist tropes, with a particular focus on the re-Orientalising of Islam, in the literary work of Hafid Bouazza, a Dutch author of Moroccan origin. It seeks to tackle the materialist incentives (intellectual celebrity and enlarged readership) that remain a neglected, but crucial motive that can connect the work of Bouazza with many other re-Orientalists. However, it does not claim that Bouazza's re-Orientalising of Islam is solely motivated by personal propensity to garner some economic benefits; for his works of fiction have undeniably participated in the shaping of a pluralised Dutch society through his celebration of the values of openness and diversity. Moreover, Bouazza's re-Orientalising of Islam is informed by his biographical history, the political and socio-cultural circumstances in the Netherlands. The process of his re-Orientalism is largely understood in the context of his circumventing and subverting of the Dutch exclusionary ethnicisation of migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse on heritage management and conservation of heritage has been expanding as traditional conservation principles confront diverse manifestations of heritage around the world. The 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity formally addresses one such confrontation, resulting in the modification of conservation practices previously thought to be universally applicable. The present article attempts to introduce into this discourse the conservation practices of the Republic of Uzbekistan, which have been perceived internationally as highly controversial, and their significance in the identity formation of the state. In developing a contextual understanding of a unique historical and socio-political reality, a deeper understanding of the values behind the controversial conservation practices is formulated. There is an idealistic expectation that upon independence, the Central Asian republics would adopt the ideologies and practices of the system that they had entered. However, there is observed a perpetuation of the Soviet political apparatus, which is paralleled in their conservation practices. A study of conservation practices at the select heritage sites in the Republic of Uzbekistan illustrates that we are observing nations in structural and ideological transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By querying the social connections that underlie Heath's and Li's overview of the peopling of London over the millennia, it becomes clear that London was made as people from elsewhere settled, maintained multiple networks of connection and created local forms of sociability. Generations of migrants built London, as those in power extracted wealth from colonies around the world through the African slave trade, theft of land from native peoples, indentured labour from South Asia, and the dispossession and cultural subordination of Irish, Scottish, Welch and English rural classes. To trace the history of London must be to explicate the intertwined processes of racialization, women's subordination, Orientalism and the cultural hierarchies of difference. As all comprehensive urban histories can do, if they address the relationships between migrants and city making, Heath and Li's account of London teaches us that underneath politically constructed migrant non-migrant divides, over time migrants become the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is constructed as a constellation of episodes composing a brief history of the Orientalist discourse focused on dryness as a condition of either ruin or inferiority. The deliberately fragmented narrative draws on sources such as Orientalist travel literature, historical events, popular culture, and findings from scientific journals to highlight how environmental imaginaries can be constructed and assembled differently, subsequently shaping problematic practices around the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the constructions of Hebrew, classical, and "Northern" antiquities put forward by an eighteenth-century network of Anglo-German scholars. It asks to what extent these constructions propose a cultural equality between these competing "antiquities", how such equality relates to the contemporaneous conception of universal history, and to what extent this development is driven by emancipatory tendencies within Enlightenment thinking. By discussing the changing approaches to Homer, Old Testament texts, and "early" European literature, the article relates the emergence of primitivism and orientalism to Enlightenment historicism and an interest in the sublime, which produces a growing focus on the importance of authentic culture and the role of the bard-poet. By discussing the connections between the work of Joseph Trapp, Thomas Blackwell, Robert Lowth, and Thomas Percy on the one hand, and Johann David Michaelis, Christian Gottlob Heyne, Johann Jakob Bodmer, and Johann Gottfried Herder on the other, the article illustrates the significance in this context of newly emerging Anglo-German scholarly networks and illuminates lesser-known aspects of Anglo-German relations in the second half of the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In colonial Morocco, cinema was effectively dynamic in reflecting the interests and values of the dominant players in the film industry: Europeans. Colonial cinema was, thus, instrumental to Westerners, whereas Moroccans were at best consumers of the moving images or, when represented, seemed to be exotic, distorted and voiceless. This article explores the ways how colonial cinema visually produced the Moroccan native reality on the screen. By questioning the grammar of representation, the focus here is to see the extent to which colonial filmmakers were associated with the colonial project and were actually vulnerable in front of its demands and political dictates. The main argument is that colonial cinema—though pre-supposedly was about the extra-European reality—continued to articulate an orientalising discourse that regarded the native characters not beyond the limits of the colonial imaginary, but within its predefined boundaries. To understand how colonial cinema operates stylistically, it will be appropriate to analyse it in the light of Edward Said's theorisation of the concept of representation with respect to the Self/Other dichotomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines representations of Asia and Asian characters in contemporary Irish writing, drawing on the discourse on Orientalism and other postcolonial theories. Orientalism in Irish studies has undergone multiple phases: from the Celtic-Oriental ties that stressed cross-colonial identification with Eastern countries as a way to bolster nationalist narratives during the Celtic Revival, to the comparison with new and futuristic, late capitalist East Asian "Tiger" societies from the 1990s to the present day. Irish Orientalism thus stands uneasily between traditional Anglo-European Orientalism, which continues to reproduce certain stereotypes of the Other, and anti-imperial agendas that challenge established colonial discourses. While differing from its British counterpart, Irish literature has often been complicit in producing and sustaining Orientalist images, especially in its representations of migrants. By analysing Yan Ge's short stories set in Ireland, this article offers a rare perspective from the Other side. Yan Ge's thematic and formal consideration of her status as an Asian outsider aims to dis-orient and re-orient Irish readers. By looking steadily back at the Orientalist gaze, the portrayals of cross-cultural encounters in Yan Ge's works help to create more fruitful and equitable conversations regarding Ireland's role in the global order and its changing relationship with Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Weber's work on the rise of rational capitalism in the West, as well as his comparative work on the religion of China and India, and the criticisms of Orientalism that it has attracted. The overall argument is that while some of the criticisms are valid, others rest on a misunderstanding of his aims and a superficial reading of his work. It argues that Weber's aim with this study was to solve the puzzle of why rational capitalism first developed in Western Europe and not in India or China, two societies that were in some respects more advanced than Europe. Weber did not make a value judgement regarding the overall superiority of Europe. His vision of the mutually supportive, dynamic and often contingent relationship between cultural elements and the interaction of conflictual social groups disproves the criticism that he had an essentialistic understanding of Oriental societies. Weber ignored the extent to which Europe dominated and exploited people in the periphery, but his attempt to grasp internal factors explaining the initial outperformance of Europe, which allowed them to dominate others, is valid. The article acknowledges the criticism that Weber's work was Eurocentric. His understanding of Oriental history was limited, which he acknowledged, since he regarded his conclusions about the Orient as tentative. As a result, his comparative concepts and hypotheses are of more interest than his empirical analysis of the Orient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, the world has seen an incredible surge of Chinese performers in Western classical music. Unknown to most outside of Chinese musical networks, these musicians often began their training as young children, learning from parents who lost musical ambitions during the Cultural Revolution and who hoped to realise them through their only child. However, as children rapidly developed musical skills and entered conservatories, other career paths became eliminated. Drawing from anthropologist Aihwa Ong's work on 'flexible citizenship' and ethnographic fieldwork in Mainland China, Canada, and the United States, I theorise the 'strategic citizenship' of these students and their families. I do so to argue that the strong presence of Chinese instrumentalists in Western classical music has resulted from a desire, even a desperation, amongst many families to negotiate intergenerational traumas and acquire socio-economic stability in the neoliberal age. In this process, transnational Chinese musicians must also contend with issues of precarity and Orientalisms abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In 1869, the year the Suez Canal was completed, visits to Egypt and, therefore voyages to the Orient were increased. Crowned royals such as Prince and Princess of Wales, French Empress, Prince of Prussia, Austrian Emperor, Prince and Princess of Holland, and Duke of Aosta went on these voyages, which included cities like Alexandria, Cairo, Istanbul, and Athens. What makes these crowned royal’s travels to the Orient in 1869 distinguishing and worth investigating is the presence of women. Examining on the Istanbul part of the voyages, this research accepts women as historical actors. It aims to interpret European women’s gaze on both Ottoman Istanbul and their ‘other’, local Muslim women, through their time-space experiences. This paper focuses on travel narratives produced by the women in the suite of British and French crowned royals in the 1869 travels to decipher women’s real time-space experiences. Levant Herald (LH), a local newspaper published daily in Istanbul, was also examined to grasp locals’ perspectives simultaneously. While emphasizing the [un]met expectations of both counterparts’ (guest/local), this paper discovers diversifying positionalities of women towards their other and reveals their heterogeneous gaze. Although women’s gaze -and thus narratives- contain many orientalist codifications, their gender privileged time-space experiences challenge and disrupt some of the stereotypes and prejudices prevalent in the male-dominated literature of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have studied the significance of the press in the process of modernization of the Ottoman Empire in general terms, the effects of women's periodicals on domestic architecture and design have not been adequately investigated. In the Tanzimat period (Reorganization) (1839–1876), some two thousand weekly and monthly newspapers and periodicals were published. Affordable press and the rise of literacy – particularly female literacy were the two driving forces of modernization. Readership expanded further in the Hamidian era (1876–1909). Later, perhaps emboldened by the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1908, Ottoman women published opinion pieces, designating themselves as authors. Operating as advice literature, women's periodicals offered information on the latest European fashions in dress, music, crafts, the arts, family life, and etiquette. Some authors advocated for reforming residential interiors to reflect a more modern world view, while traditionalists opposed it. Ironically, even when traditionalist authors were warning their readers against the ill effects of Westernization to evoke fear in hearts and minds, they were still exposing them to a forbidden world; a world in which women had roles beyond wifehood and motherhood. The public discourse on the role of women in society, dress, and public etiquette led to the questioning of traditional gendered domestic spaces. The new Ottoman woman had to dwell in a modern domestic interior that reflected her newly-found values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suchitra Choudhury's monograph is an impressive and extensive study on the cashmere shawl in British literature, anatomizing it as both a valuable commodity and a rich metaphor in literature. In his seminal work on commodities, Arjun Appadurai determines that objects enjoyed a social and cultural "life", as they were traded and absorbed from and into varying cultures and traditions transnationally.[1] In I Textile Orientalisms i (Figure 1), Suchitra Choudhury unravels the multivalent and polymorphic "life" of one such fashionable, imperial object - the Cashmere shawl and its Scottish imitation, the Paisley. [Extracted from the article]

This paper aims to examine how Morocco is represented in the works of Jean and Jérome Tharaud, Henry de Montherlant and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. More specifically, the paper attempts to develop a more nuanced vision of how Morocco is viewed in French travel writing than what previous studies (mainly those adopting the Saidian approach) suggest. Indeed, since Edward Said's Orientalism was published in 1978, French literary representations of Morocco have generally been examined in terms of their engagement with the French imperial establishment. This paper focuses on the images of Morocco in the works of the four selected writers to offer a new conceptualization of French Orientalism, one that can be considered as both an application and a criticism of Said's Orientalism. The outcome of the analysis shows that while the Tharauds' views of Morocco are marked by the same racism and imperialism Said talks about, Montherlant's and Le Clézio's views of the country seem to subvert traditional clichés and stereotypes, providing two paradigms of a Western portrayal of the Orient that go against Said's study of Orientalism. It is therefore argued that the French literary construction of the Orient (Morocco in this case) is neither completely racist and imperialist as Said and the saidists pretend, nor completely objective and innocent as the Orientalists would have us believe. French Orientalism, as conceptualized in this paper, contains a mixture of different views and attitudes. Hence the use of the plural form 'Lenses' instead of the singular 'Lens' in the title. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article turns to the trajectory of an often ignored figure in the history of French Islamology, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch. Through the trajectory and circuits of de Vitray's life and thought, it explores the ambiguity of a forgotten variety of twentieth-century French Islamology, one which attempted to make itself into a mystical study of mysticism and follow the internal logic of its object of study. This article considers the aspects of de Vitray's life and thought that cannot be purely reduced to the circuits of imperialism, or predestined to be a spiritualist search for the "mystical East" as the inferior other of the "rational West." It looks at the possibility of partial disidentifications from the Orientalist commitment to the European imperialist project, "moments of departure" from classic Orientalism. These can be found in the moments of identification with the mystics who are studied by Islamologists like de Vitray. The East, here in the form of Islamic mysticism, no longer functions as "a career" but rather enables possessive and colonial epistemological attitudes to be defied. Through de Vitray's biography, trajectory and works, I suggest that the Orientalist "type" she represents introduces a form of double-translation that does not make the studied object immediately available for colonial use or scholarly possession, but rather generates a transformative conversion of the translator and scholar whose position of mastery is "cast into dust," to use Rumi's words, and is transformed into a position of discipleship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay suggests that we reconsider orientalism by including women's largely disregarded perspectives about the orient. It focuses on Négar Djavadi's Disoriental as a model for disorientalizing the Orient through a poetics of adjacency – a creative process that puts voices, events, and circumstances side-by-side using modes borrowed from narrative's sister arts – to suggest a basis for an orientalism that doesn't forget Said's Orientalism, but rather sets beside it another orient that modifies it. Generated by aesthetic strategies from cinematography and music, Djavadi creates the disoriental subject, one who has left the Orient but carries with her an alternate orient emerging from comparative practice built upon modes of recontextualization in the Kuleshov effect, of juxtaposition in rear projection, and of inversion suggested by the 45-rpm record. Notions of disorientation, beside, and cultural collage underwrite Djavadi's plan of besidedness, which conceives an orient for the disoriental subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Odalisques feature prominently in western paintings of the secluded harem especially at the height of such paintings' popularity in the colonial nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Lewis, 2004). When a painter draws an Oriental odalisque, he is sure to draw an artistically scopophilic object. While indulging himself in his sensual art, this same painter exercises his masculine power to exploit the body of the woman whom the odalisque now represents. Noticeably, the presence of a harem odalisque, be it a presence in writing or in visual art, recalls the seminal The Arabian Nights, the mecca of odalisques' lovers; and its enchanting harems and harem women, on top of them is the arch-odalisque Scheherazad. It is drawing on the heritage of The Arabian Nights and its plethora of Orientalist images that the Arab American poet Mohja Kahf (b. 1967) is inspired to entitle both her poetry collection E-mails from Scheherazad (2003) and the poem under scrutiny in this paper "Thawrah des Odalisques at the Matisse Retrospective" (Kahf, 2003, pp. 64–69). In drawing on that heritage, Kahf, a writer who belongs to a racial minority and is a feminist herself, uses the renowned odalisques painted by the French artist Henri Matisse (1869–1954) as a mouthpiece that exposes the enduring Orientalist stereotypes and counterattacks them. Through Matisse's odalisques, Kahf narrates a story of how a past replete with misconceptions about the Orient and Oriental women continues to feed mainstream Western thought sabotaging the image of Arabs and Arab Americans (and the women among them in particular). It is in the heart of New York, one of the world's most modern cities, that those women-slaves of art inaugurate their revolution against the enduring stereotypes and liberate themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the nineteenth-century erudite style of reasoning within the scope of a historical debate over the origins of the name Brazil. In order to do so, we present and discuss how this style of reasoning was applied in an erudite text – Questões Americanas (American Issues) -, read in a Brazilian historical society in 1863, and published in the review of the society in 1866. The essay was written by a nineteenth-century Brazilian scholar, Joaquim Caetano da Silva (1810-1873). His main hypothesis for the origin of the word 'Brazil' was that its meaning derived from words in Asian languages that designated the brazilwood, similar to the one abundant in the region conquered by the Portuguese in early sixteenth century. We examine how discovering the Asian origins of 'Brazil' and positioning the history of his country's name in a context of medieval and early modern global commercial exchange were instrumental for an attempt to question and discredit an alleged French origin for the name, in a period in which Brazil was countering French imperialism at the same time as it was deeply influenced by French culture and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with identification and interpretation of the costumes featured in two portraits of Polish aristocratic women by Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Katarzyna Potocka née Branicka in Oriental Costume, 1854 (National Museum in Warsaw) and Wieńczysława Barczewska, Madame de Jurjewicz, 1860 (Museum of Fine Arts in Boston). The former outfit, brought by the wearer from her journey to the Near East, references dress worn by Greek women in the Ottoman Empire. The latter is fancy dress featuring the jacket called polka, harking back to the overcoat called kontusz, iconic of the Orient-inspired historical Polish national dress. Winterhalter's painterly treatment showcases the wearers' agenda for selecting the ensembles that reflected their personal circumstances and also conveyed patriotic allusions in the context of Poland's current status as a partitioned nation. The meanings of the "oriental" elements in both costumes extend beyond the note of exoticism to which they have been hitherto reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book takes as its subject matter the "planetary discourse of decadence" (159), which Fieni reads as both a modern, or pre-decolonization, and contemporary, or post-decolonization, phenomenon linked to colonialism. In a disciplinary landscape in which national literatures and their departments are increasingly under threat of contraction, and where the idea of global French and the global Francophone has arisen to combat this, David Fieni's I Decadent Orientalisms i provides a needed example of what scholarship in this new comparative, multidirectional disciplinarity might look like. Fieni's postcolonial examples mark how writers react creatively and critically against the discourse of decadence in ways that reveal the philological history of Orientalist discourses. [Extracted from the article]

Victorian travellers, explorers and scholars in the Levant produced a series of ethnographic observations of Palestine's indigenous population essentially through biblical lenses. These perceptions sought ultimately to retrieve the biblical past in the context of the imperial present. At the same time, modern historiography about ancient Israel developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the full-blown allochronism and Orientalism of the early modern Western visitors to Palestine have in recent decades been surpassed by more critical insights in the scholarly assessment of the region, some traits from that Victorian ethnographic and Bible-centred gaze still linger in contemporary historical constructions of ancient Palestine through the concept of 'ancient Israel', notably in the conceptualisation and periodisation of such a history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent ethnomusicological research concerning affect has mostly favoured contexts with lively and flexible performance standards at the expense of traditions that emphasise strict restraint and conformity to prescriptions. This gap in understanding risks erecting a new orientalism, and so this study aims to prevent such a possibility by demonstrating how a 'restrained' performance tradition does indeed affect. The forms and arrangements of mediators are highlighted as critical to producing the uniqueness of affective experiences, and subsequently, a more diversified approach to studying affect is proposed by introducing and delineating the term 'shades of affective experience'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thimithi – the Tamil Hindu fire-walking ceremony has always attracted the attention of the curious and the thrill seeker and remains a tourist attraction as well as the performance of a solemn vow in many parts of the world where it continues to be enacted. A source of much speculation as to the participants' apparent ability to withstand the pain of walking over hot coals, travellers' often exaggerated accounts of eye witness attendance at such events regularly graced the columns of western journals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article focusses on an unusual investigation carried out in colonial Mauritius in mid-1874. The enquiry resulted from a published description of thimithi written by Nicolas Pike, former American consul on the island which caused concern at the colonial office in London, who asked for an explanation. This produced a set of reports, firstly by British police officers, and secondly, but more remarkably, by leading members of the Tamil community on Mauritius. Their detailed and occasionally humorous responses to the western orientalist gaze deftly unpick the absurdities and hypocrisies of the so-called ruling caste whilst their very involvement serves to complicate our understanding of the relationship between white settler and Indian 'subject' in the mid-Victorian colonial empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the social experiences of Iranian female immigrants in schools in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on postcolonial theory and critical whiteness studies, I interrogate the ways in which 'Oriental' subjects are Othered among their peers, and how whiteness is established as the invisible norm. This study observes the role that having an immigrant, English-as-a-second-language (ESL) identity plays in shaping the participants' social experiences at school. The women in this study rejected racism as a plausible cause of their social exclusion. I suggest two possible explanations for this: (1) the 'Aryan myth', which still heavily circulates within Iranian communities, constitutes a subtle mechanism by which white supremacy is culturally inherited by many Iranians; (2) the participants' ability to 'pass' as white acted as a privilege which made race a less salient marker of difference to them. Instead, their status as the 'Oriental Other' was most visible when language was concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long poem of Walt Whitman entitled "Passage to India" (published in 1871, written in 1869) celebrates the opening of the Suez canal (1869) in its role as linking the East with the West, the spirituality of Asia with new technological innovations of the modern world. Walt Whitman, the undisputed father of American poetry, presented the world in the nine sections of the poem as one "global village". On analysing the poem, we can see the Orientalist subtext associating the primitive with the Other and the scientific with the self. There is also in the poem a political lining of enthusiastic American nationalism – and its so-called correlative, "Manifest Destiny" – in which Whitman sees America and its expansion as the last stage of empire that will build a utopian world. Whitman's belief in "the imperial mission of the United States" as well as his commitment to the ideology of Manifest Destiny is apparent in his poetry. This nationalistic fervour is countered by an internationalism where Whitman or rather the poetic persona in the poem projects the brotherhood of all peoples and the integration of all continents. Unpacking the political substrata in the poem that are couched in rhetorical devices will reveal an inherent tension between claims. It is time to challenge the myth of Whitman as a prophet of brotherhood and a progressive poet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly emerging 'social problem films' on Kashmir appear as a shift from the conventional construction of Kashmir and Kashmiris in Bollywood. This study, through critical narrative analysis (CNA), examines the politics behind the representation of the 'social problems' of Kashmir in recent Hindi films. As the narratives of these films are marked by selectivity and arrangement of historical events, this study demonstrates that Orientalist tropes continue to figure in the films in new forms. It is demonstrated that the films, whose narratives are fully dedicated to the 'inside' of Kashmir, inflict layered violence against the actual political and historical realities of the region. While engaging with the colonial and post-colonial binary trope of people-versus-land, the films not only obfuscate the historical context, they vindicate an outside intervention by presenting an axiomatic image of the events, cut off from their socio-political and historical roots. The two films under scrutiny in this study are Haider (2014) and Laila Majnu (2018). The subject matter of both is Kashmiri youth, and far from unveiling the 'youth problems' of Kashmir, they end up constructing a fresh imagery in which the 'psychotic' behaviour and trauma of Kashmir's 'misguided' youth is socially located and explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Tariq Ali's novel The Stone Woman (2000) attempts to deconstruct identity by blurring the self/other distinctions and sets the groundwork for hybridity wherein 'otherness' emerges as a signifying process open to interpretation. The critical parameters of the study emerge from an investigation of the post-colonial context, suggesting in its process a displacement of the fixity of Manichean thought. Drawing upon Homi Bhabha's theorization on "third space" and "hybridity" and Edward Said's "other", the article demonstrates how the novel configures identities as woven through the rich cultural textualities that people live in and provides alternative spaces to deconstruct Eurocentric identity discourses. This article argues that the novel proposes a paradigm of idealized Muslim identity that deviates from reductive Eurocentric representations of Muslims as the "other" and exposes such reductive perspectives as traditional to Orientalist discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines Britain's Middle Eastern policy discussions in relation to the future of Kurdistan. It argues that perceptions of the Kurdish question were significantly influenced by the conflicting strategies of the India Office and of the Foreign Office. The primary aim of this study is to examine Mark Sykes's specific role in determining the future of Kurdistan by neglecting its cause in the post-Ottoman settlement, which has not been considered in the previous literature. Sykes's views of the Kurds strongly influenced the British policy decision not to recognize the validity of the Kurdish question, and to leave the Kurds off the new map of the Middle East. In addition, this article identifies the role of Orientalist ideology, critiquing Sykes's perception of the Kurdish question by applying a post-colonial approach primarily based on Edward Said's theory. It concludes that Sykes's understanding of Kurdistan was translated into the British policy-making process, both during the war and in the postwar period, which consequently contributed to the post-Ottoman complexity of the Kurdish question to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa was the largest European port on the continent for several hundred years. Despite its centuries-long importance, the Cape and its role in the rise of nineteenth-century globalisation remains largely unexamined and our dominant analytical frameworks have been constructed from a Northern Hemisphere perspective focused on Europe, Asia and North America. This article, based on an analysis of port data for Table Bay (Cape Town) from 1806 to 1836, examines what happened to global trade from the perspective of the Cape Colony. Through this Southern Hemisphere lens, a new aperture opens onto the British world, making it possible to observe how the Empire reintegrated and reconfigured itself in the decades after losing its American colonies, how new economies developed in the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and Southern oceans and how they were linked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pandemic has compelled educational institutes across the world to hastily adopt, adapt and cope with digital learning by developing 'digital classrooms', virtual learning environments replete with sophisticated technological features. The eagerness of the intent to ramp up technological infrastructures, however, is not reflected in the rethinking or redesigning of pedagogies for digital learning. Technocratic ambitions often have very little, if anything, to do with pedagogy. Moreover, the digital classroom is 'global' by design, and the ethnocentric framework wrought upon by such designs impedes the decolonizing of the curriculum. It depletes local pedagogic cultures: local histories and cultures, political and moral economies. This article argues that imagining the digital classroom a-temporally and a-culturally, typically from a technocratic point of view, signals a tryst with (techo-)orientalism in its new avatar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]