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This essay is an excavation of Islamic theological confluences in Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics. It likewise demonstrates how comparative theology facilitates the de‐essentialization of religious traditions. This essay uses the Swiss theologian as a case study in exposing how someone apparently closed off from interreligious learning is still inadvertently shaped by non‐Christian traditions. Being adjacent to the work of Anne Carpenter, who seeks to save his theological project from Eurocentrism, this essay seeks to save it from theological exclusivism and Orientalism. It will argue that in the case of Christian theology, confluences of the Islamic in the past offer possibilities for future exercises in comparative theology. It looks back to look ahead by suggesting theo‐poetics as a new direction for Christian comparative theology with Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Ignaz Goldziher, the founder of Islamic studies in the West and considered “the spiritual father of the new Islamologists" among Western Islamic scholars, deeply influenced many orientalists with his studies. The scholarly evaluations of Goldziher’s books and articles based on rich sources, to which he is highly regarded in both the West and the East, show that he was overcome by his emotions in many places, that he reached baseless and wrong conclusions, that he tried to force the sources to confirm what he had constructed in his mind, that he selected the material suitable for his axiom, that he generalized too easily, that when he could not find narrations in the historical material to support his thesis, he resorted to intellectual interpretations and distorted the facts. These scholarly analyses reveal that Goldziher ignores evidence that contradicts his own view, tries to prove what he rejects in one place, takes and uses information that suits his purpose even if it is from unreliable sources, disregards evidence that contradicts his opinion, and does not value the opinions of Muslim scholars who contradict his thesis. Therefore, all these findings indicate that Goldziher lost his scholarly objectivity and abandoned scientific research methods. The reason for writing this article is to evaluate Goldziher’s accusations against Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s al-Musnad in his article “Neue Materialien zur Litteratur des Ueberlieferungswesens bei den Muhammadanern (New Materials on the Literature of Narration among Muslims)” published in 1896. As a result of our research, it has been observed that there is no other study that has been critical of Goldziher’s allegations in the aforementioned article, and this article has been written in order to fill this gap and to contribute to the correct introduction of the aforementioned orientalist. The article is limited to analyzing Goldziher’s accusations against al-Musnad. The method of data collection and analysis was used in the study, and various studies on the aforementioned orientalist were also utilized. At the end of the article, it was determined that Goldziher tried to devalue alMusnad by saying that Ibn Hanbal included many ḥadīths with problematic isnads because he was a member of Ahl al-Ḥadīth and that the narrations in al-Musnad had many kussās (religious storytellers) in their isnads. Likewise, despite his son Abdullah’s warning, Ibn Hanbal tried to soften the situation of a kezzāb narrator and tried to discredit al-Musnad by claiming that Bukhārī and Muslim wrote their own books to save the ḥadīths in al-Musnad from the state of sloppiness and that this showed that even at that time the state of trust in the authenticity of ḥadīths was very bad. Goldziher likened al-Musnad to a large pile of rubble consisting of waste materials by claiming that there were too many narrations of those who fabricated ḥadīths to encourage people to worship, ḥadīths of fitnah that were transmitted by naming people, places, and events, and fabricated ḥadīths praising the Umayyads and Abbasids, and that if this difficult obstacle could be overcome, some valuable pieces of information could be reached, thus undermining the reputation of al-Musnad. It is concluded that Goldziher’s interpretation of Abdullah ibn Ahmad’s statement after the narrations recommending the writing of ḥadīths as “creating a counterweight to the narrations in al-Musnad that prohibit the writing of ḥadīths” and “legitimizing the reasons for the existence of compilations such as musnad” is both a reading of intentions and a way of presenting his assumptions as absolute truths. In sum, it is concluded that Goldziher’s approach to Ibn Hanbal’s al-Musnad is not positive, that he aims to raise doubts about this main source of ḥadīth, and that he continues his extreme skeptical attitude towards ḥadīth in this article [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religions of South and East Asia resist Eurocentric interpretations, such as the so-called World Religion Paradigm. However, they are subjected in various ways to hetero- and auto-orientalist representations that respond to Western ideals and expectations. This article analyzes how Italian Catholic teachers use online representations of East Asian religions in their lessons to teach these traditions. The aim is to shed light on the interplay, facilitated by online environments, between contemporary processes of Eurocentric and Orientalist interpretation and the educational and confessional motivations of confessional religious education teachers. The result of the analysis indicates that these factors concur to reinforce misleading representations, which contradicts the intercultural aims proclaimed by teachers and other Teaching of Catholic Religion stakeholders. Nevertheless, this article also individuates those elements that could be fruitfully framed in an academic study-of-religions perspective and suggests a modality of cooperation between Catholic Religion teachers and scholars of religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines representations of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in the French press. Analyzing these representations will help one to better understand the Western perceptions of the Ottoman Empire and the Orient. This study is based on the analysis of selected French newspapers such as L'Illustration, Le Journal Illustré, Le Monde Illustré, L'Univers Illustré and Le Petit Journal, as well as other secondary sources (articles and books). Using a critical discourse analysis, this study aims to comprehend how the West, particularly the French press, positioned Abdülhamid II and the Ottoman Empire and how it evolved over time. The analysis of the coverage of Abdülhamid II's accession to power and, afterwards, his portrait as a Sultan demonstrates not only the struggle of the European powers (especially France and Britain) to gain supremacy over the Ottoman Empire but also the orientalist discourse of the French press with regard to Abdülhamid II. While the coverage of Abdülhamid II's enthronement ceremony contains both positive and negative representations of the Sultan and the Ottoman Empire, a negative approach was adopted mostly in the coverage of his portrait after his accession to power as Abdülhamid II, as he adopted a policy of balance vis-à-vis the European powers. Overall, the French representations of Abdülhamid II and the Ottoman Empire shed light on the rivalries among the European powers over the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the life and significance of Pasvanoǧlu Osman Pasha, an Ottoman notable in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Despite being portrayed negatively by the central government, Pasvanoǧlu had support from both Muslims and Christians in the Vidin region. The article analyzes his depiction in Ottoman archival documents, chronicles, and travelers' accounts, shedding light on the complex relationship between provincial elites and the central government. It also discusses Pasvanoǧlu's successful defense against the siege of Vidin in 1798 and his opposition to the central government's reforms. The article highlights the contrasting European portrayals of Ottoman rebels, with some depicting them as noble figures fighting against tyranny. [Extracted from the article]

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]

Previous scholarship has interrogated how transsexual autobiographies recursively construct a gender-coherent subject through travel analogies. Orientalism has been one of the predominant frames through which these trans travel narratives have been interpreted. Through a close reading of Jan Morris's autobiography, Conundrum, this paper attends to the overwhelming anti-Blackness that scaffolds these voyages to and through the Orient. Exploring how "Black Africa" has been occluded from Orientalist analyses of trans travel narratives, the author asks what might be found by attending specifically to the role of Africa (as a metaphor for Blackened rather than Orientalized geographies) in these autobiographies. Through Black studies, trans studies, affect theory, and Kleinian object relations theory, the essay demonstrates how Blackness grounds both trans travel narratives and the scholarship about them. Through a metacritique of both Orientalism and trans studies, this paper concludes by suggesting that scholars provincialize Orientalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural depictions of Asian/white miscegenation have long been a source of fascination for scholars within Asian American and sexuality studies. Such a long-standing interest has not only provided key insights into the Orientalist structure of racialized sexuality, but it has also kept our sights set, perhaps too set, on deciphering the Asian woman both in the context of romance and as an object of desire. This essay recasts the narrative of Asian/white sexuality as one of minoritarian retribution, making the argument that insofar as Asian femininity forms the object of racist desires, it can also function as the basis for feminist revenge. The author contemplates racial fetishism through twenty-first-century feminist cultural production, namely the work of mixed-race artists Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Maya Mackrandilal, showing how neoliberal multiculturalism has become further embedded within the infrastructure of everyday encounters, giving rise to something we might call the erotic life of anti-racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, British social media influencers posted pictures and stories from Dubai. As a result, the emirate faced an intense backlash from the British media. This study considers the British media's motivations for constituting Dubai as Orientalist 'other' while uncovering earlier imagined geographies of the Orient. The study develops the novel concept of 'intermedia geographies' to trace intertextual links, tales, texts, content, audiences and discourses, as dynamic constellations of the postdigital condition. Unique methods of postdigital critical discourse analysis are developed to map a corpus of 20 British magazine, tabloid and broadsheet newspaper articles, which are the jumping-off point to intertextual references to television, film and earlier Oriental narratives. Theorizing levels up from description to nuanced analysis to illustrate that the themes of content, stance and social actors' positioning within the corpus are indicative of Britain's siloed mainstream audiences and postdigital reinforcements of colonial discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Dany Laferrière has demonstrated a continuous engagement with Japan, beginning with the novel Éroshima in 1987 and continuing to his most recent publication in 2021, Sur la route avec Bashō. The aim of this article is to understand what role Japan plays within Laferrière's writing and how it helps us understand the complex network of sex, power, and race in his work. Between the cosmopolitanism of the network of nation-states and the despair of identity politics, I situate Laferrière's use of Japan as a fantasy that empowers the writer beyond the impasse of a white-black racial imaginary. Reading Laferrière this way allows us to understand how his writing uses the fantasy of the Orient, often to the detriment of Asian women. As such it contributes to comparative work between Asian and French literatures, debates in Francophonie, and critical understandings of race in the Francophone sphere of the Americas. [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 narrative of 'reform' in Saudi Arabia, recently recurring in British political discourse around the kingdom's Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, is situated within wider Orientalist themes, wherein a progressive and modern West is juxtaposed with an Arabian peninsula mired in backwardness. In this context, the purported Arab 'reformer' is presented as the ideal ally of the West, attempting to haul his society up to the West's supposed standards, for example on women's rights. This racialising narrative serves to legitimise British support for authoritarian Gulf regimes, thus helping to sustain the political economy of this set of international relations at the political level. It does this by obscuring the important role the United Kingdom plays in sustaining authoritarianism in the Arabian peninsula by externalising the explanatory focus onto the terrain of cultural difference. This article contributes to the literature on UK relations with the Arab Gulf monarchies by critically analysing the ways in which racialising discourses dovetail with material interests to reinforce and sustain these ties. In doing so, it also contributes to the emerging literatures on 'racial capitalism' and 'race' in international relations, through its exploration of the role of Orientalist discourse in this significant empirical case study. [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]

The British presence in India, which began to appear in the seventeenth century, turned into a huge colonial empire in the nineteenth century with the military policies followed by the East India Company. While the British unlimitedly exploited the underground and aboveground resources of the Indian Subcontinent, which gave them the Industrial Revolution, they also aimed to implement a number of cultural policies that would make the local people happy rather than complain about this situation. Orientalists employed for these purposes were pioneers in importing the thought and lifestyle that developed on the axis of nineteenth-century Western modernity to the region and spreading it as an ideal “value” among the locals. However, the fact that the Islamic faith encompasses the minds of believers and the central position of the words and deeds of the Prophet in regulating the daily lives of Muslims seems to have played a protective function in the spread of this value and lifestyle, accompanied by imperial expectations, among Indian Muslims. In this context, this study focuses on the claims by British orientalists employed in the subcontinent Aloys Sprenger (d. 1893) and Sir William Muir (d. 1905) about the words and deeds of the Prophet in the understanding of hadith of Sayyid Ahmed Khan, (d. 1893) a modernist thinker, and the criticism of Sayyid Ahmed Khan's understanding of hadith in the context of colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joseph Besson's 1660 account of Jesuit missions in Syria offers a rare glimpse into the region's cultural landscape from the perspective of French Jesuits living among diverse communities of Jews, Christians (Greek-Orthodox and Catholic), and Muslims. Drawing on unpublished Jesuit relations from 1625 to 1659 and an unsigned map of Syria, this article explores Besson's portrayal of Greater Syria, a region encompassing modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and western Jordan, within the Ottoman empire. A detailed analysis reveals that the map is likely an original Jesuit creation, highlighting how Jesuit spirituality influenced their interpretation of physical spaces. Furthermore, the study illuminates the Jesuits' role in shaping European views of the Orient and the Holy Land, contributing to the early development of Orientalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the persisting legacy of stigmatized Asian foodways—unclean, unsafe, barbaric, and inherently inferior—back to a particular mode of race-thinking that has deep roots in medieval Latin Christian discourses on food and still pervades popular Western imaginations. Through a case study of two thirteenth-century Franciscan friars, John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, who traveled to Central Asia, it examines how a particularly Orientalist mode of race-thinking helped negotiate a pressing concern over food for medieval European Christians who are invited, or compelled out of necessity, to eat Mongolian foods. Culinary encounters in the East for European Christians often called for an Orientalizing racialization of Eastern foodways to make it safe and even enjoyable to take a bite of exotic foods, which can be best demonstrated in the case of William of Rubruck, who became fond of comos (Mongolian fermented mare's milk), a drink considered illicit for Eastern Christians. For William, culinary Orientalism served as a key racializing strategy to articulate fundamental differences between European Christians and Eastern people, especially non-Latin Christians, whose theological understandings of food differed from Latin Christians. I argue that William's repudiation of the Eastern Christians' reluctance to drink comos not only made it possible for him to drink it freely and publicly through an aggressive decontextualization of Eastern foodways, but also generated for him a similar kind of pleasure to what bell hooks conceptualizes as the pleasure of "eating the Other." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 1939, the Jewish community in mandatory Palestine was rocked by a terrible case of infanticide: a father was charged in the British Mandatory court with murder, having buried his five-day-old infant son alive. Unlike other crimes of homicide that were discussed in court, in this case the intervention of a scholar after the final verdict had been handed down changed the court's decision altogether. This paper shows how a forgotten story can serve as a case study for the wider cultural, social, and legal contexts in which it took place. Using an interdisciplinary examination of a specific case, the paper explores the power relations and cultural negotiations between Jewish inhabitants and British officials in Palestine, as well as among Jews of different origins and backgrounds and also within British legal system itself. This examination uncovers the role of European-Jewish orientalists in mediating between British authorities and Mizrahi Jews by making efficient use of the changing attitudes of imperial legal high officials toward the colonial subjects. It underlines a unique trait of Jewish academic orientalism: integrating into a Jewish-national society involved previously unfamiliar duties that had to do with the overall Zionist social initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The warnings about Turkey's not-so-near accession to the EU are explored as a strategic tool in the Brexit campaign, linking concerns about sovereignty and immigration compounded with the anxieties surrounding Islam and the threat of terrorism. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Edward Said's Orientalism and the unique perspectives gathered from British Turks, this paper sheds light on their nuanced responses. It uncovers strategies of disbelief and denial in the face of the constructed narrative that portrayed Turkey as an undesirable 'Other' with its predominantly Muslim population. A closer analysis of some British Turks' narratives is premised not only on the sacralised defence of the principles of Turkish westernisation but also on the socio-political reputation of the Islamic Ottoman past as almighty. The article equally contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between British national identity and discourses surrounding immigration, sovereignty, and Islamophobia within the context of Brexit, as well as the principles by which the privileges of modern, secular Turkey, as well as the demise of the mighty Ottoman image, are maintained. In a paradoxical manner, the act of denial only serves to affirm the Brexit campaign's narrative depicting Turkey as an undesirable 'Other' with a predominantly Muslim demographic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article excavates the Eurocentric roots of Iranian nationalist discourse, which emerged from the political and intellectual trajectories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Premised on the epistemic privilege of the Persian language, a selective remembrance of the past, and forging an internal Other, I contend that this raciolinguistic ideology equated Persianness with Iranianness and naturalised Persian as both a language and a race. I begin by tracing the origin of Iranianness or Irāniyat: a concept coined by Mirza Fath'Ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, two influential figures in late Qajar Iran, whose writings introduced and disseminated the Eurocentric and Orientalist view of the non‐Persian Other. In the second section, I examine how the Berlin Circle, a group of Iranian nationalist intellectuals in the early 20th century, elaborated these ideas into a coherent racial and political ideology that later informed the Pahlavis' state‐building project in 1925. The last section of the article engages with the recent neologism of the 'Persianate World', an intellectual enterprise imbued with an Orientalist predisposition that aims to inscribe a trans‐border and transcultural quality to Persian culture far beyond its current boundaries, encompassing Eurasia and Central Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "The Girl from the Golden Horn" by Karolina Watroba is presented. It explores the orientalism within the context of inter-war Berlin and Vienna. It delves into the novel's depiction of Muslim communities in Berlin, Germany particularly through the protagonist Asiadeh Anbari, and examines the connections between Muslim and Jewish communities during that era.

This essay examines how the Erast Fandorin series by Boris Akunin (Grigorii Chkhartishvili) employs, revises, and deconstructs the Orientalist paradigm through the portrayal of Masa, the detective's Japanese sidekick. At first glance, Masa appears to embody Orientalist clichés through allusions to a familiar ethnic stereotype. But the Fandorin series does more than activate the preconceived role of a Russian hero's Asian valet: in reformulating the detective story narrative, Akunin introduces both Orientalist and Occidentalist perspectives and ultimately reconfigures the master‐servant structure as something similar to a Confucian, father‐son relationship. Despite the stereotypical ethnic image reproduced in the series, Masa's representation is divorced from the colonizing agenda that is fundamental to Orientalist discourse. After appearing at first as a Colonialist sign, Masa's depiction turns out to be a pastiche without the implied referent whose trajectory in the cycle traces choices made by Akunin (and ultimately Chkhartishvili). While the author first and foremost pursues entertainment, as the series progresses, he exhibits signs of postcolonial political awareness by flipping and deconstructing the quasi‐Orientalist mode. As a result, the initial division between the implicit perspectives of the fictional and nonfictional authors turns into an alignment of the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several English‐language adaptations of the Indian epic Rāmāyaṇa have been published since the beginning of the 21st century. The epic has been regarded and recreated as a metonym for the Indian nation. Contemporary versions have often referred to Indian geography and have tried to poetically or literally associate mythic spaces with real ones. In this paper, I use discourse analysis in order to study some of the most influential 21st‐century English‐language retellings of the Rāmāyaṇa. I conclude that these and other versions of the epic describe India as a regionally divided nation which can ultimately be united through national geography, its association with mythology and the contrast between the geography of India and that of foreign nations. In this sense, I regard these contemporary versions as a ‘literary pilgrimage’ through which Indian readers can get to know the geography of their nation and regard it as sacred. [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]

Bektashism, with its unique philosophy, has been a sect that has been viewed with suspicion by other Islamic groups, especially the Sunni Ulema, and accused of activities contrary to Islamic tradition. The Ottoman rulers, on the other hand, were confronted with the complex role of Bektashis in the empire. While they used Bektashism as a means of strengthening state authority in the early periods, they restricted it to a narrow field "military" in the later periods as the Sunni understanding gained strength in the bureaucracy. With the prohibition of Bektashism, the institutional structure dependent on the state authority was dismantled and Bektashism was persecuted in every field. With the Islamism policy of the Abdülhamid II period, the pressure and measures increased even more. In the atmosphere of the period, the negative view of Bektashis evolved into different debates. One of these debates was the accusation that Bektashis were engaged in Christianisation and Christianising the population. In addition, Western researchers looking for traces of Christianity in the Balkans also approached the Bektashis from this perspective and endeavoured to base their claims on various grounds, considering them to be secret Christians. In our study, the historical background from the Bektashi image, which was gradually shaken in the Ottoman Empire, to the allegations of Christianisation against them will be given and these debates will be analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, East Asians across the globe have been ostracized, othered, pathologized, and subjected to numerous anti-Asian hate crimes. Despite contemporary China's rapid modernization, the country is still perceived as an Oriental and primitive site. Taking these cues, the current article aims to investigate the Sinophobic attitudes in the wake of COVID-19 through a detailed analysis of sequential comics and cartoons by artists of East Asian descent, such as Laura Gao and Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom. Drawing theoretical insights from Alexandre White's "epidemic orientalism" and Priscilla Wald's "medicalized nativism," this essay investigates how these chosen comics function as counternarratives through first-person storytelling. In so doing, these comics, while reinstating the dignity of East Asians, also challenge and resist the naturalized methods of seeing that justify violence and dehumanization. The article further argues that Sinophobia and anti-Asian hate crimes are motivated as much by the origins of COVID-19 in China as by the political, economic, and technological variables that have shaped modern China. [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]

The article provides a critical review of the film Girls to Buy (Dziewczyny z Dubaju) (2021) by Maria Sadowska in the context of the Polish Dubai-gate scandal and the discourse of the sex trade and trafficking. The intersection of gender, ethnicity and class guides this inquiry into the ways in which both the conservative Polish nationalist agenda and the neo-liberal opposition to such an agenda rely on the phobic Orientalist tropes that configure the Arab world as the main culprit and the 'face' of the kleptocratic capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the evolution and current trends within the field of Buddhist Studies in the U.S. It examines how scholars are challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries, addressing issues of diversity, decolonization, and methodological inclusiveness. Key themes discussed include the need for demographic diversity, the engagement of emic scholarship and the embrace of critical theories analyzing gender, race, and class.

Families of choice is an important framework used to think about non-heterosexual people's attachments. This means the family of origin has received limited attention when theorising their relationships. This group has often been considered in relation to coming out, which centralises the importance of sexuality for understanding kinship ties. This paper extends the limited, but growing scholarship on non-heterosexual people, and their families of origin. It does this by drawing on a larger project on the lives of gay men of South Asian descent, in Australia. Results demonstrate that attachment through blood, shared history, emotions, and obligations, firmly embed gay South Asian men in their families of origin, even when there is disapproval of their sexuality. More broadly, the study resists framing the respondents and findings in culturally essentialist terms, premised on an 'East' versus 'West' binary. It argues that by resisting such orientalism we can see similarities pertaining to families of origin across different contexts, and in doing so, produce queer scholarship able to speak across divides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the production and reception of Love as Strong as Death, a dramatization of the Song of Songs that was performed in Mandatory Palestine in the years 1940–42 by a group of Yemenite Jewish actors. We argue that the tensions between the actors' amateur status and their image as embodying a long-lost Biblical heritage were emblematic of the inherent contradictions within the hegemonic Ashkenazi Zionist discourse and the Orientalist perception of the role of Yemenite Jews in it. By exploring both Yemenite and Ashkenazi voices in and around the production, we analyse how the stage, the theatre hall and the written press all served as contested sites regarding the participation of non-European Jews in Hebrew theatre and culture. In the paper's conclusion, we demonstrate how Love as Strong as Death anticipated later debates in Israeli theatre about the place of Mizrahi Jews on stage and in the auditorium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay builds on Walter Johnson's "On Agency" to reflect on how the concept of the liberal subject as agent has been understood in Euro-American and Japanese intellectual discourses on Asia and especially Japan. It begins with a discussion of "the subject" in Orientalism and Liberalism and its entanglements with historicist and imperialist understandings of a progressive "West" and laggard "East," as well as the travels of Orientalist discourse from Europe to Asia. It then considers how postcolonial interventions as well as Foucault's critique of the liberal subject have stimulated a rethinking of the self-constituting agent of choice and ends with thoughts on how a multiply spirited notion of the subject may offer suggestions for conceptualizing an alternative agent of action and social responsibility who refuses the self-importance of a singular subject. [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 article aims, from an anthropological and historiographical perspective, under a long-term analysis, to understand how it was consolidated and the consequences of colonialism in current Palestine. We will adopt a methodology that intersects ethnography and historiography, and we will bring a counter-polar vision, produced by Palestinian people, based on the counter-hegemonic media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hundreds of publications written in various Western languages throughout Europe at the end of the 19th century followed a generally negative trend. However, in the 20th century, orientalists emerged on the scene, nailing the plank of their predecessors. They educated their people about Islamic realities that they were still unaware of through their in-depth studies of Islam. After a thorough examination of the Qur'ān, Hadīth, and other Islamic knowledge sources, Islam was produced on these strong foundations. Ronald Victor Courtenay Bodley (1892--1970) was a writer of 19 compositions, a scriptwriter, a biographer, and an official in the British Army. Before the First World War, he traveled to Kashmir while serving in the military. On the counsel of Thomas Edward Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), he voyaged to Algeria and the Sahara desert where he went through seven years among the Arabian migrants. During his stay in Kashmir and the Sahara desert, he found the opportunity to learn about Islam and the Prophet of Islam (...). So on his arrival to England, he chose to compose the history of the Holy Prophet (...). In this article, a critical analysis of his writing "The Messenger, The Life of Muhammad" (...) has been presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]