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This article argues that Hebrew theatre is defined by a hegemonic Ashkenaziness that has been present from its beginning and which continues today. It identifies four main components of this hegemony, each of which is examined in turn. The first two components, Hebrew culture and Eurocentrism, are analyzed in relation to the repertoire of plays presented at such theatres as Habima, Ohel, and Cameri. This repertoire combines Yiddish plays and translations of European plays, while also reproducing Orientalist attitudes towards Mizrahi culture. The third component, privileged citizenship, centres on the privileges afforded to Ashkenazi artists and actors in the theatre when compared to Mizrahi actors, especially in terms of casting decisions. Finally, hegemonic Ashkenaziness is defined by membership of the middle class, which, in the theatre, leads to productions being targeted at an Ashkenazi audience and its cultural capital. [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]

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]

The proposal presented here sought to identify the conceptual and methodological potentialities that are summarized in "Periodistan - An Argentine on the Silk Road". To do this, we sought to bring closer the author's perspective and situated experience through his journey to address it from and through an analytical-conceptual framework in as a geographical interpretation. The proposed methodology focused on addressing the author's stories as an ethnographic roadmap, to identify the perspective of the inhabitants of distant spaces on the scale of the place. It should be noted that this type of work allows us to approach and understand the (New) Silk Road from a (dis-orientalized) perspective of the actors who inhabit and experience these territories. The work invites us to get out of the stereotypes and geographic otherness of non-Western territories. The difficulty of approaching distant spaces leads us to present this type of proposal to collaborate with new perspectives on the cultural configurations imposed by the media. In this sense, "Periodistan" allows us to activate our geographical imagination, discovering distant spaces, crossing borders, knowing cultures, dismantling stereotypes, and learning from history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Western-centered discourse is analyzed based on literary texts, a new intellectual profile appears, who has the problem of having commitment to her own culture and tradition. Considering the spread of this discourse on the literary texts, we encounter a kind of fiction that creates the text based on the Western canonic and cultural codes. Elif Safak's novels which we examine in terms of the means of culture and tradition points out the problem of commitment and assimilation of the intellectual profile that is isolated from her own value criteria and has formed her cultural borders on a European level. In this context, the author's way of establishing Western-centered text and developing unilateral discourse can be read as the influences of orientalism on Turkish intellectuals. With the image of 'other', the novels of the author who creates Western-centered text seem far from objectivity due to its source and a deviated structure. In this article, we will examine Elif Safak's motivation for creating Western-oriented texts and her unilateral approach to events with text-based analysis of the novels Ask, Araf, Baba ve Pic and Iskender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edward Said, who is a key intellectual figure in the theory and interpretation of western European colonization and decolonization, sees criticism as personal engagement and a matter of character and not simply scholarship. He is highly influential in the fields of colonialism, postcolonialism, representation and interpretation. Of the many influences Said in turn has undergone, those in French deserve specific exploration. This article explores some of these influences, but it also looks at some of Said's own representations of French and French-speaking culture. To this end I will examine how Said in some of his key works addresses, among other things, the role of the intellectual, Orientalism, colonialism, and literary theory. My approach is chronological. I will first turn to the role the French-speaking world plays in Said's first published book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), and then to a couple of Said's most celebrated works: Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its publication in 1978, Edward Said's magnum opus Orientalism has generated fierce and unrelenting debates regarding its epistemology and scope, and the interpretive validity of its Western cultural representations of the self and other. Since then, however, the world has become increasingly governed by different sets of assumptions, ideologies, relations of production and reproduction, and matrixes of power relations. This article considers whether orientalism has kept its hold on Western public opinion, media presentations, political elites, and sections of the scholarly community's mode of thinking in the current neo-liberal, globalised, digitalised and securitised world. It also considers whether its mutation has shifted to engender a paradigmatic change and argues that alongside the old-style orientalism, a more sophisticated, subtle, and up-to-date perspective has appeared. Although its emphases, concerns and methodologies might represent a certain departure from old orientalist dogmas, its objective seems to remain largely intact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds light on the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's interest in Egypt and the Arab world. It underscores the influence of his tour in Egypt during the opening of the Suez Canal on his works, drawing on the theoretical underpinnings established by Edward W. Said. The study foregrounds Ibsen's correspondence, plays, and other works that include references to his two-month stay in Egypt and to his encounter with the Arab culture. Ibsen's references validate the Western stereotyping and ideology that have influenced a wide array of Western writers in the ways they misrepresent and misinterpret the Arab culture, and concomitantly other references mirror a personal force of admiration. Additionally, the article discusses the idea that Ibsen's sojourn in Egypt did not alter his viewpoint of the Arab culture in general and the Egyptian one in particular which is markedly controlled by the Western stereotyped image of Arabs and their culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lives and labour of migrants are increasingly shaped by political precarity and rightlessness in an unevenly globalized world. We argue that 'undesirableness' rather than mobility is constitutive of the 'migrant' position. Besides underscoring the asymmetrical power relations that define the position of the 'migrant' vis-à-vis the receiving state and society, an optic of 'undesirableness' also foregrounds the governmental techniques deployed to produce the figure of the 'migrant'. We suggest that the framing of migrants as 'unwanted' is pivotal to the European non-entrée regime, which parallels cultural exclusion through an Orientalization of the discourse on migration. The immutable cultural alterity of the (Muslim) 'migrant' is thus presumed to pose a perennial threat to Western 'liberal' values. Two assumptions undergird this narrative of the 'undesirable' migrant as the quintessential 'Other' of the European Self: cultural determination of behaviour in migrant communities, and incompatibility of 'migrant cultures' with those of 'host' societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on algorithms tends to focus on American companies and on the effects their algorithms have on Western users, while such algorithms are in fact developed in various geographical locations and used in highly diverse socio-cultural contexts. That is, the spatial trajectories through which algorithms operate and the distances and differences between the people who develop such algorithms and the users their algorithms affect remain overlooked. Moreover, while the power of big data algorithms has been recently compared to colonialism (Couldry and Mejias 2019), the move from the colonial gaze (Yegenoglu 1998) to the algorithmic gaze (Graham 2010) has yet to be fully discussed. This article aims to fill these gaps by exploring the attempts to algorithmically conceptualize "the Other". Based on the case study of an Israeli user-profiling company and its attempts to sell its services to East Asian corporations, I show that the algorithmic gaze—algorithms' ability to characterize, conceptualize, and affect users—stems from a complex combination between opposing-but-complimentary perspectives: that it is simultaneously a continuation of the colonial gaze and its complete opposite. The ways in which algorithms are being programmed to see the Other, the ways algorithmic categories are named to depict the Other, and the ways people who design such algorithms describe and understand the Other are all different but deeply interrelated factors in how algorithms "see." I accordingly argue that the story of algorithms is an intercultural one, and that the power of algorithms perpetually flows back and forth—between East and West, South and North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs the history of the Indian YMCA's Orientalist knowledge production in an attempt to capture a significant, if forgotten, transitional moment in the production and dissemination of scholarship on the religions and cultures of the Indian subcontinent. The YMCA's three Orientalist book series examined here flourished from the 1910s to the 1930s and represent a kind of third-stream approach to the study of South Asia. Inspired by the Christian fulfillment theory, "Y Orientalism" was at pains to differentiate itself from older polemical missionary writings. It also distanced itself from the popular "spiritual Orientalism" advocated by the Theosophical Society and from the philologically inclined "academic Orientalism" pursued in the Sanskrit departments of Western universities. The interest of the series' authors in the region's present and the multifarious facets of its "little traditions," living languages, arts, and cultures, as well as their privileging of knowledge that was generated "in the field" rather than in distant Western libraries, was unusual. Arguably, it anticipated important elements of the "area studies" approach to the Indian subcontinent that became dominant in Anglophone academia after the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Avrupa'da Bir Cevelan narrates a journey which Ahmet Mithat Efendi set out on for the 1889 Stockholm Congress on Orientalists. In the book, while, on the one hand, Ahmet Mithat describes the European culture in many ways, on the other hand, he mentions his impressions which he got during the congress and the issues handled in the meetings which he participated. Some of these issues are related to Turks. In addition to Turkish, Turkish history, Turkish literature, the Tatar and the Ottoman Turks, the developmental levels of other Islamic nations are among these matters. Apart from the congress, Ahmet Mithat makes comparisons between the Turkish and the European cultures for various reasons. Both at the congress and during their trips other than the congress, Ahmet Mithat sees that the general of the Westerners know neither "the East" nor the Turks well. Moreover, with his novel entitled Ahmet Metin ve Şirzad, which he wrote when he returned from his journey to Europe, he aims to reveal the greatness of our nation on the one hand and defends our culture and civilization on the other hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the ways in which Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951) mobilizes Arabo-Islamic culture for the construction of Hebrew culture as manifested in his writings that treat Arabic literature. The essay's argument comprises two parts: first, that Yahuda's production of Arabic poetical literature endeavored to familiarize Jewish communities, in particular European Jews, with Arabic culture. As such, I argue that Yahuda did not Hebraize Arabic poetical texts nor he Judaize Arab figures that he treated. Rather, he preserved essential characteristics that were intended to acquaint European Jews with the otherness of Arabs and simultaneously with the Jewish self. Second, Yahuda's efforts also sought to draw a connection between contemporary Jews and their "Israelite brethren"—in Yahuda's words—as Yahuda concurrently urged his Hebrew-reading audience to embrace spiritual and moral values that characterized the Jewish forefathers. Prominent Arab figures, particularly poets, represented the perfect example to transmit moral values that Jews needed in order to restore their relation with the land of their ancestors. In advocating for embracing moral values such as bravery, loyalty, and hospitality, Yahuda's noble Arabs and heroes represented the Orientalism of Arabic culture and its relevance to the Jews of his time, highlighting the common denominators between Arabs and Israelites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By arguing that a new 'School' is crystallising in the study of India, Deborah Sutton (2018, "So called caste: S. N. Balagangadhara, the Ghent School and the Politics of grievance." Contemporary South Asia 26 (3): 336–349) has brought to the surface phenomena that are typical of any encounter between competing research traditions. Some difficulties of understanding are caused by conceptual change: in the dominant research tradition, 'Hinduism' and 'the caste system' refer to structures that exist in Indian society; in the research programme developed by Balagangadhara, these terms designate experiential entities embedded in a western cultural experience of India. This conceptual divide also extends to the empirical: because the study of caste and Hinduism is collapsing under the weight of accumulated anomalies, certain problems are crucial to the alternative theorising of the Ghent School, whereas they seem irrelevant to the dominant tradition. Sutton engages in the polemics characteristic of confrontations between competing research traditions. She distorts and domesticates unfamiliar ideas from this School by mapping them onto notions familiar to her. Consequently, she confuses Balagangadhara's hypotheses about colonial consciousness with hackneyed stories about 'Orientalism'. The article concludes with a puzzle: Why does Sutton recognise a group of researchers as a new School, while trying to dismiss them as 'acolytes' who reproduce the 'mantras' and 'dogmas' of an Indian thinker? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss the 2016 Brazilian surf movie Um Filme de Surfe by Bruno Zanin and Leandro Dora, featuring surfers Yago Dora, Yuri Gonçalves and Lucas Silveira. This small group of Brazilian surfers and their camera crew travel on a chartered boat to an island in the Indian Ocean to catch an incoming swell, where they pretend to find an unknown surf paradise. While doing so, they orientalise the local Indonesian culture as an exotic, pre-modern 'other' who they, the 'translocal' modern surfers, encounter and teach about modernity. I will also examine how they perform a 'bro' masculinity that forms a 'fratriarchy' based on hijinks and pranks. In Um Filme de Surfe, the Brazilian surfers neglect to establish a dialogue with the local Indonesian islanders. They do not represent themselves as postcolonial subjects visiting a fellow culture from the global South; they are the cosmopolitan translocal surfers and the locals are mistaken for Polynesian islanders. I will then discuss how this film broadly reflects the challenge of representing non-white, non-Western surfers in the genre of surf films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Italian public debate, the Mediterranean has represented a discursive formation employed to describe the South as the Other of the North. It has been associated with cultural representations and discourses of civicness that identify the South along a specific set of sociocultural elements, moral norms and forms of civic organization. The Italian city of Naples holds much empirical evidence as an originator of such discursive formation. Since the early 1990s, singer-songwriters attempted to transform stereotypical views of Naples and the South, and to popularize a positive idea of Mediterraneaness on a cultural, ethnic and political dimension. This article aims to explore this process through musical and ethnographic sources, and to discuss the way it is mobilized in forms of protest against racism, xenophobia and the rise of extreme-right in contemporary Italy. Neapolitan artists Eugenio Bennato, Almamegretta, 99 Posse and collective Terroni Uniti provide the case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judith Gautier (1845-1917) is best known as muse to Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner. More recently, critics have started crediting her for bringing Asian culture to Parnassian-era Paris in her 1867 translations of Chinese poetry, Le Livre de jade. In most of her translations, Gautier adapted Chinese texts to suit personal and contemporary French poetic ideals, which were in turn appropriated by readers as models of Chinese ideals. Her poetic creations reveal an early modernist style, which is at once disorienting and familiarizing. This article reconsiders Gautier's translations to show how and why these adaptations replaced original Chinese sources for subsequent generations of modernist poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé, Ezra Pound, and Kenneth Rexroth. Orientalist tendencies in these eminent poets are products of Gautier's subjective, gendered, and inventive interpretation of the East, shaped not only by the translations themselves but also by Gautier's ways of understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It seems that Orientalism is enjoying a resurgence, offering yet more distorted images of the Muslim world, and more specifically Muslim women. In this essay, I take Jan Goodwin’s Price of Honor as a case in point, a book which projects images that seem to galvanize around an inferior Muslim world where men are bloodthirsty, polygamous and helplessly oppressive of female members of their families. The book reiterates Edward Said’s views on the West’s creation of an “imagined” Orient, yet adds to it new charted cartographies of a reductionist Islamic world that allegedly possesses identical traits. First, the paratextual elements of Goodwin’s book are quite revealing: the cover picture of veiled Afghani women, the sensational title, chapter titles, epigraphs and maps are extremely telling of the preconceived ideas on which the book rests and which the text only supports. The language chosen and the “facts” listed in Goodwin’s account reflect an obvious Orientalist perspective and lead to erroneous overgeneralization that would in turn offer readers distorted images of Islamic cultures and peoples. Goodwin’s work unfortunately seems to offer a superficial understanding of Islam and is an example of the Islamophobia currently pervading the world. Thus, Goodwin fails in her mission to “lift the veil of silence” of Arab women and instead helps in propagating negative images of Muslim women through revisited Orientalist lenses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper participates in the contemporary discussion about literary texts that speculate on the future(s) of humanity with a view to commenting on the fears, anxieties, and drawbacks of the present. It looks at Karen Tei Yamashita's "Anime Wong" through the theoretical lenses of scholars debating the identity configuration model of a posthuman world in connection with the ethnoracial discourse. "Anime Wong" imagines a posthuman future inhabited by an exclusively Asian population of cyborgs and aliens. The mythological foundation of this Asian posthuman civilization draws on the cultural pillars of Western culture. Subtitled "A CyberAsian Odyssey," Yamashita's "Anime Wong" borrows the Homeric Odyssean pattern, filters it through the 'mythologies' of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, and mixes it with political comments and references to Western philosophy and popular culture. It then impregnates the result with distinctively Asian elements and uses the mixture as a figuration of an ethnocentric posthuman future, thus commenting both on the cultural implications of cybernetic technologies and on the ethnic clichés and stereotyping predispositions at work within contemporary culture. The aim of this paper is to look into how "Anime Wong" filters the Asian ethos through the cultural products of Western imagination to provide a critical ground for engaging the techno-orientalist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hippy trail flourished in the 1960s: it was one of the most dramatic examples of the values of the counter-culture. This essay first presents a sociological sketch of typical travellers, and then considers how ordinary hippy trail travellers interacted with local people. It compares the attitudes of hippy trail travellers with the classical model of Orientalism, and notes that the travellers largely distanced themselves from imperialist culture. The essay establishes that there were a variety of reactions by travellers to their experience, ranging from racism, through fear, shyness and romanticization, to attempts to create reasonably egalitarian forms of cross-cultural communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

, edited by Eleonora Sasso; pp. xii + 227. The nine essays collected in I Late Victorian Orientalism: Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art, and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge i offer several riches, especially those that truly fall into the category delineated by the collection's title. [Extracted from the article]

This study problematizes the theoretical synthesis in discussions between Foucault's structuralist and poststructuralist "textuality" and "discoursivity" and such concepts as ideology, hegemony, colonialism, imperialism, other, generation of identities deriving from Gramscian Marxism in terms of giving life and historical, ideological and imaginative reality to the Orient in front of the Occident, taking into consideration Orientalism by Edward Said. Orientalism that changes the classic representation in academic world and which connects politics and ideology as it is based on an independent and actional object deals with conceptualization focusing on ontological and epistemological contrast between the East and the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue discusses texts and cultural artefacts that defy the idea of Europe as a homogeneous and coherent construct, with a focus on north/south, East/West divisions. Starting from a series of case studies, the contributions address questions such as: Where does Europe begin and who establishes these boundaries? Who is considered European and who is not? How is difference described, represented and imagined in zones that are positioned within Europe, often at its core? What metaphors or narrative strategies are used to describe the other within Europe? Do writers from minority cultures participate in orientalized representations of their own culture? If orientalism can be conceptualized as the opposite of civilization, is it necessarily connected to notions of backwardness? If so, how does this play out in a European context? The range of the case studies considered in this issue is broad: chronologically, the essays span the nineteenth century to the present, and geographically they go from Russia to France, from Croatia and Hungary to Catalonia and the Basque countries. Overall, the essays take a transnational approach that considers ethnic, cultural and linguistic differences and notions of belonging within and beyond political units. A common ground is provided by recurrent critical concepts that offer a useful theoretical framework for discussion, such as Roberto Dainotto’s argument that Europe constructs itself not only in opposition to the non-Western, but also to its internal other, and Milica Bakić-Hayden’s notion of ‘nesting orientalism’: that is, the idea that countries who have been orientalized can also appropriate this discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world, people from different countries, cities and institutions unprecedentedly resemble each other in every aspect of life. Likewise, the deeds and imagery aspirations of Oriental and Occidental people also resemble. In such an atmosphere, the local cultures rooted in history become accessories and lose their historical significance and metaphysical aspects in the edifice of the society. This study aims to analyze Prophet Muhammad's (s.a.w.) warning, "Who so imitates other people becomes one of them", its layers of meaning and its relationship with "image and global resemblence". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Istanbul's discursive positioning as a city of cultural ambiguity offers a productive way of approaching disorientation conceptually: the image of the city reveals a struggle to orient itself amidst and across discourses of Orientalism and modernity. Within that struggle, the city's metaphorical fogs, from the prototypical representation of the city's fogs by the modernist poet Tevfik Fikret to Prince Abdülmecid's eponymous painting, from the Republican writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's transmutative dream to the melancholy mists of Orhan Pamuk, constitute an unlikely guide to its exceptional experience of disorientation. The city constantly changes and various forms of literary or figurative fog accompany experiences of disorientation especially during the fraught transition between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, where the discourses of modernity and Orientalism coalesce and disorient one another. Each instance of fog/mist discloses something about the struggle to orient the city, as well as the struggle with ‘the Orient’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study attempts to answer the question why Confucianism, the dominant 'teaching' among the Three Teachings, is not a religion in contemporary China, unlike the other two 'teachings,' Buddhism and Daoism. By examining this phenomenon in the social-historical context, this study finds its origin in Orientalism. The Orientalist conceptualization of religion became part of the New Culture discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. While China has undergone tremendous social changes over the past century, the old discourse remains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is common to speak about ‘Roma culture’ as a single entity, the questions posed by Roma culture are more complex. We are speaking about the general issues pertaining to various manifestations of this culture in the context of the Czech Republic. It must be stressed that under ‘Roma,’ we understand a family resemblance social category that consists of overlapping smaller groups and that is not based on features that are universally shared across the whole category; there are similarities and some kind of prototype that keeps the category together. Also, this culture is in no way completely separated from the majority (Czech) culture and it shares many features with it and vice versa. Because of the particular history, there are no language barriers, there are no religious differences and also community values and aims are broadly similar. So when we speak about minority/majority, we must try to avoid thinking in terms of distinctive and separate entities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My agenda is to ground psychological science in culture by using complex rather than overly simple models of culture and using indigenous categories as criteria of a translation test to determine the adequacy of scientific models of culture. I first explore the compatibility between Chinese indigenous categories and complex models of culture, by casting in the theoretical framework of symmetry and symmetry breaking (Bolender, 2010) a series of translations performed on Fiske's (1991) relational models theory. Next, I show how the dimensional approach to culture, prevalent in mainstream psychology, fails the translation test. Ethical implications of this analysis for cross cultural psychology are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conducted qualitative content analysis, using the theoretical lens of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, of nine study abroad flyers to India and Egypt sponsored by social work schools in the United States. We show that the promotional content of these flyers cater to Orientalist biases; we recommend measures to amend it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the XIXth century, in the history of the Romanian culture, the French influence was very strong. In all fields: administration, commerce, justice, arts and sciences, the special languages and the Romanian language, in general, borrow many neologisms, both through direct contact with French culture productions, and indirectly, through the French spoken by Russian officers present in the Romanian space in the era of the Organic Regulations. Therefore, the modern era means the sunset of Orientalism. Even if one cannot speak about a trenchant apostasy, there is a clear orientation towards other cultural spaces. The Romanian-French cultural connections are, on one side, mediated by translations of some French literary and scientific works into the Romanian language, but also by translations from Romanian into French of some important works of the Romanian scholars who wanted to raise awareness of the values of national culture to Europe, to world. The theories and the ideas of the Romanian researchers from different fields have sparked interest in the Romanian culture, in general, and towards the Romanian language and they have served to integrate use in the universal spiritual circuit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-9/11 American neo-Orientalist representations pervade today's politics and journalism about the Arab World. Since the first emergence of the Middle East representation in American writings of the nineteenth century, one can assume that nothing has changed in representations of the Middle East in the US. This article explores a twenty-first century phenomenon called "neo-Orientalism," a style of representation that, while indebted to classical Orientalism, focuses on "othering" the Arab world with the exclusion of some geographic parts, such as India and Turkey, from the classical map of Orientalism. Although neo-Orientalism represents a shift in the selection of its subject and locale, it nonetheless reproduces certain repetitions of and conceptual continuities with its precursor. Like classical Orientalism, neo-Orientalism is a monolithic discourse based on binarism between the superior American values and the inferior Arab culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Said, this essay posits an orientalized Sardinia and argues that the regional primitivization of Sardinia derives from its construction via a series of orientalist travelogues. The main argument of the essay is a Saidian reading of Sardinian culture, in which it is maintained that, due to particular historical, geographical and (most interestingly) linguistic factors, Sardinians are particularly enthusiastic participants in the analysis and ‘ethno-orientalization’ of their own culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This text follows closely a paper given in May 2007 to the third seminar, held at University College London, of an ESRC seminar series co-organized by the author, Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths College, University of London) and Azzedine Haddour (University College London) entitled ‘Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting’. The paper offers a preliminary discussion of Bourdieu’s analysis of Islam in his first book, Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958). It suggests that, as a young philosopher aspiring to undertake social anthropological or sociological research, he sought to reconcile the legacies of Durkheim and Weber. The methodology and conceptual apparatus deployed in this early text did not enable Bourdieu to appreciate the function for social agents of their religious practices and affiliations in a way which might have been possible for him in his later, ‘post-structuralist’ phase. As a ‘Research Note’, the text is reproduced so as to encourage further detailed study of Bourdieu’s work within the Algerian context and to suggest lines of inquiry in relation to his early intellectual formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The French exploration of Tibet (1846–1912) and its resulting culture has been largely neglected by critics. Accounts of French-speaking travellers in Tibet have mostly been subsumed into the imperial and geopolitical framework of British policy in the region. This framework, which came to be known as the Great Game, informed all British expeditions of the imperial period. Yet the insights and representations developed by French explorers in fact constitute a largely separate and specific cultural paradigm. The approach of the earliest Tibetan explorers is paradoxical inasmuch as they perceived both the land and its inhabitants to be so wild and savage that the existence of a Tibetan culture seemed impossible. Working with a diverse range of French texts and accounts dating from the latter half of the nineteenth century, I shall explore this attitude under the heading of what I propose to entitle the ‘Tibetan paradox’. But this paradoxical approach to Tibetan landscape and its inhabitants was to be definitely superseded by one the most unusual travellers ever to explore the country, Jacques Bacot (1877–1965). On the basis of his expeditions, from 1906 to 1910, in uncharted parts of the country, Bacot came to play a leading role in the development of French Tibetology. In the accounts of his travels, Bacot pays close attention to how Tibetans themselves represent their environment. This change in focus signals the emergence of a new understanding of Tibet, for which the term ‘Tibetan médiance’ − to borrow a neologism from the French geographer Augustin Berque − might profitably be coined. Bacot’s perspective marked the first step in the development of an entirely new set of questions that were to arise within the human sciences in France during the twentieth century. As such it constitutes a cornerstone in the literary history of French representations of Tibet. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a theoretical analysis and ethnographic account of Asian American student leadership in higher education. Existing literature highlights Asian and Asian American leadership styles as cultural differences. I shift the analysis from culture to racism in order to work toward a more socially just conception of Asian American student leadership, grounded in the social and historical realities of racism in the U.S. I bring the issue of racism to the forefront by framing this project in racial formation theory and Orientalism and by looking at Asian American student leadership in the context of anti-racism activism. Participants challenged the notion of “Asian American leadership” in two ways: First, students described how they struggled with the Asian American racial category in their day-to-day lives as student leaders, and second, they discussed the negative consequences of being racialized as Asian American leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the last two centuries, "the West" has meant far more than a mere geographical area. Europe's centrality has been emphasized in the production of culture, civilization, technology and scientific knowledge and has also created a high-level of perception within various activities. Colonialism, capitalism, industrialism, Orientalism and globalization have all played a dominant role in the formation of this perception. The purpose for the existence of almost all societies around the world has been reduced to the European mindset, effort and culture by these means. There is a swift progression through a cultural uniform world with extreme forcement by Europe. Education is one of the most important devices in this process. Europe started to implement a significant educational program since after the Industrial Revolution in order to maintain its current advantages and work towards improved conditions. Europe shaped its own society in the way it intended mainly through modern education. Correspondingly, non-Western societies have willfully become supporters of Europa. This process continues onto a global scale with all its delicacy, philosophical background, and inclusiveness. In this paper, modern education, which has been shaped by the European mentality is criticized by using secondary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Confucius Institutes (CIs), modelled on similar European organizations, promote China's official national language and culture abroad. Unlike their European counterparts, however, the interactions between CIs and Canadian audiences are haunted by complex histories of a racialized "Oriental Other" in Canada and "Western Other" in China. Through ethnographic research on the Confucius Institute in Edmonton and the CI Headquarters in Beijing, this paper explores racialized representations of China and Chinese culture, as well as racialized understandings of the desired Western audience, in both locations. I argue that representations of Chinese culture are caught between two competing logics which I term reorientalism and reorientality. Reorientalism attempts to reclaim definitions of Chineseness and redress misunderstandings about China while simultaneously making China comprehensible and ultimately marketable through reorientality, or a use of familiar Orientalist tropes. Canadians (most often imagined and represented as white) are encouraged to engage with this reorientality through their own performance and embodiment of Chinese culture (a conceptually distinct process I call re-orientality) as a means of understanding the project of reorientalism. However, the spectacle of Chinese culture through CIs resonates with Canadian multiculturalism in ways that may unintentionally reproduce a social landscape that normalizes whiteness and the consumption of ethnicized Otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the public intellectual and postmodern theorist Palestinian American Edward Said's perspective on Orientalism, including critiques of his perspective. Said's view on the relationship between imperialism and Westerners' Orientalist attitudes, including on the relationship between Western and Eastern civilizations and Westerners' attitudes towards Arabs and Islam, is discussed. The Orientalist scholars Bernard Lewis and author Ibn Warraq's perspectives on Said's literary and cultural theories, are discussed. The portrayal of Orientalism in Western literature is also discussed.

Edward W. Said’s Orientalism has attained canonical status as the key study of the cultural politics of western representation of the East, specifically the imaginative geographies underwriting constructions such as the Middle East and the Islamic world. The Ottoman Empire overlapped both European and exteriorized Oriental space during much of the period that Said dealt with, yet while the existence of the empire is referred to in Said’s study, the theoretical implications of that presence for his critique of Orientalist discourse are not. The material presence of the Ottoman state, in the Arabic-speaking lands, but also crucially, and for a longer period, much of south-east Europe and Anatolia, highlights long-standing Oriental geopolitical and cultural agency in the face of unidirectional narratives of western encroachment. Attention to the specific discursive manoeuvres undertaken by the West to handle that disruptive, intrinsic Ottoman presence in Europe itself may add traction to the notion that the Orient was imagined as a radically exterior point of comparison. It is argued that the history of western representation of the Ottoman Empire constitutes a pre-Orientalist discourse, whose dual, perennial purpose is to make pragmatic accommodation for an Ottoman Oriental material presence in Europe yet never to fully acknowledge its discursive presence as being of Europe. I argue that by supplementing Said’s critique with a full consideration of the Ottoman legacy, a reformulation is possible that integrates the Islamic Orient as an intrinsic component of historically informed notions of European space, while dissolving notions of the absolute distinction of that latter construct from the wider milieus in which it is embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Henry James together with Edward W. Said, a leader in shaping the postcolonial conversation notably in his book of 1978 and 1993 "Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism." It emphasizes Said's thinking that bear on James as the former represents the left wing in a lineage of aesthetic historicism he shares with James. While Said's writing has little specifically to say about James, each time he reflected on the form and institution of the Western novel, James name came up.

The branding of ayurveda as a market strategy for the health consumer has become an important factor in the creation of 'New Age orientalist desire'. Using Vedic Village as a case, this paper shows how new age orientalism has been spread in modern India to middle class professionals, entrepreneurs and overseas health tourists. With this representation, ayurveda has become a wellness therapy instead of a means to restore health, and affluent people can now buy a package of 'ayurvedic healthy life' without changing their lifestyles. In addition to Euro-American health tourists, emerging middle class professionals and entrepreneurs in modern India have also become an integral part of the process of 'new age orientalization'. This paper concludes that the commodijied version of ayurveda, which has been developed in the West as part of 'wellness and spa culture', has become popular among the affluent middle class in India and abroad today, and through this the West has claimed and justifies authority over Eastern medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the institutional mode of academic knowledge production in Cambodia since the beginning of the colonial period. It addresses the importance of French official orientalism represented by the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient and its role in constructing a reified narrative of the nation state of Cambodia centred on the Angkorian "golden age" while orientating intellectual "modernization" through the renovation of Buddhism. This top-down approach was pursued by the successive post-independence regimes — to the exclusion of the Khmer Rouge who systematically destroyed Cambodia's intellectual and cultural life. In contradiction with state initiatives, a few researchers — mostly French and Cambodians — chose to orientate their research toward ethnographically relevant subjects, taking Cambodian society as principal agent of cultural and historical meaning. This trend, referred to as "Khmer Studies", found its programmatic autonomy among exiled Cambodian intellectuals in the 1980s, paving the way for grass-root initiatives developed in Cambodia in the wake of its re-opening in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is ‘irrational’ marks particular cultures as ‘Other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to ostensibly ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this text are presented Edward Said's ideas concerning the formation of orientalism as a collection of scientific and literary representations, as well as the representations in common use, whose background is the European will of domination over the Oriental region. He examines the movement of scientifically affirmed ideas into more general use in other fields, especially in literature. The accent is on the power of open discourse and the role of language itself in the interpretation of reality; to what extent language creates conditions for the perception of our original experience through its adoption into the structure of language. The fact that orientalism exists depends more on the Occident than on the Orient and all this because of western representational forms and structures. Said's analysis shows the form and interior organisation of this field, its beginnings, ancient authorities, distinctive representatives, and new authorities. This being with the objective of revealing the dialectic between a writer or a text and the complex corpus to which his text makes contribution. Said examines orientalism as a dynamic exchange between the individual authors and larger political interests. The most important stereotypes of orientalism: Oriental inferiority, Oriental cruelty, the Threat to the Western Civilisation, Exagerated sensuality, Lack of rationality, all appear within the works of the majority of Occidental writers. Oriental Inferiority was used within orientalistic discourse as an excuse for the need of the European presence in the region, running beneath a veneer of the "mission civilisatrice" of the colonial conqueror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the significance of Orientalism when studying representations of otherness at present. In the book "Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts," author John Mackenzie claimed that Orientalism celebrates cultural proximity, historical parallelism and religious familiarity instead of true Otherness. The author believes that Orientalism must be understood as a network of aesthetic, economic and political relationships that cross national and historical boundaries.

This paper focuses on the institutional mode of academic knowledge production in Cambodia since the beginning of the colonial period. It addresses the importance of French official orientalism represented by the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient and its role in constructing a reified narrative of the nation state of Cambodia centred on the Angkorian "golden age" while orientating intellectual "modernization" through the renovation of Buddhism. This top-down approach was pursued by the successive post-independence regimes — to the exclusion of the Khmer Rouge who systematically destroyed Cambodia's intellectual and cultural life. In contradiction with state initiatives, a few researchers — mostly French and Cambodians — chose to orientate their research toward ethnographically relevant subjects, taking Cambodian society as principal agent of cultural and historical meaning. This trend, referred to as "Khmer studies", found its programmatic autonomy among exiled Cambodian intellectuals in the 1980s, paving the way for grass-root initiatives developed in Cambodia in the wake of its reopening in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edward Said's Orientalism was first published in 1978. In this work, Said demolished the myths of the Orient that had been made famous by colonial literature as well as by European social sciences, revealing the intrinsically Eurocentric nature of discourses on the non-European 'Other'. Though this influential work has been often praised, criticized and compared at the most disparate levels, there has not yet been an attempt to analyse the Orientalism that Said denounced in comparison to one of its principal sources of inspiration and diffusion, namely, Max Weber. This neglect in the literature is even more significant insofar as Said himself referred to Weber as a central theorist in the family portrait of Orientalists, due to his historical comparisons between different religions and also to his refinement of the methodological basis of a stereotypical Orientalist discourse by means of the concept of an ideal type. This essay explores in detail the Said-Weber relation. In particular, it analyses the numerous analogies between the analytical structure of the two authors: from their epistemological ambivalence on the relation between realism-constructivism, to the relationship with Foucault and Marx and the employment of a cultural-political nexus underlying their analysis of the relations of dominion between the Orient and the Occident. The essay demonstrates that despite their apparent irreconcilability, the theoretical structures of Said's and Weber's arguments are less different than is often supposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to analyse past European legacies of colonialism, Orientalism and racism and show their contemporary influence on European encounters with and discourses on the 'other'. By showing some examples of European deep and historical implications in many contemporary disputes 'between cultures', we claim that Europe thus fails to recognize its hypocrisy and is therefore not able to approach and solve its 'problems' with the 'other'. Indeed Europe created its 'problematical other'. The paper thus analyses and problematizes general assumptions about the Islamic headscarf issue and its assumed oppression of women, and understandings of minority and immigrant cultures as immanently violent, especially towards women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years ago the intellectual projects that have become known as critical geopolitics emerged at the end of the cold war as a series of critiques of geopolitical reasoning. Drawing heavily on Edward Said''s formulations of Orientalism the critical analyses probed the dense cultural productions of danger, the rationalisations for intervention and the logics of “Western” foreign policies. The geographical specifications of the world in the political discourses used to justify numerous imperial actions, and the rationales for the provision of security came under sustained scrutiny. Now two decades later despite the supposed end of history and endless invocations of globalization, the themes of empire and Orientalism remain at the heart of the Western geopolitical imaginary, explicitly structuring how the security intellectuals of our time plan for war and justify the construction of their military machines. Given the continuing dangers of warfare in a biosphere that is being radically destabilized by the modes of economy and violence these geopolitical texts legitimize, the necessity for critique remains compelling. But given the proliferation of uses of the term critical geopolitics, and the numerous disciplinary concerns encompassed by it, perhaps the time has come to narrow its focus once again to its core themes which involve confronting and challenging the geographical reasoning used in the legitimizations of contemporary warfare. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]