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Anonymous Venetian orientalist painting, The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus, 1511, the Louvre. The deer with antlers in the foreground is not known ever to have existed in the wild in Syria.

Eugène Delacroix, The Women of Algiers, 1834, the Louvre, Paris

The Royal Pavilion.

The Vorontsov Palace (1828–46), designed by Edward Blore in English style but incorporating eastern style elements.

Chinesischer Turm (Chinese Tower) in the Englischer Garten, Munich, Germany. The initial structure was built 1789–1790.

Sultan Mehmed II, attr. Gentile Bellini, 1480

"Le Bain Turc," (Turkish Bath) by J.A.D. Ingres, 1862

Painting of the Hypaethral Temple of Philae by David Roberts, 1838

The Slave and The Lion (Georges Rochegrosse)

Orientalism is a term used by art historians, literary and cultural studies scholars for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Middle Eastern, and East Asian cultures (Eastern cultures) by American and European writers, designers and artists. In particular, Orientalist painting, depicting more specifically "the Middle East",^[1] was one of the many specialisms of 19th century Academic art. Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, the term has arguably acquired a negative connotation.

Meaning of the term[link]

"Orientalism" refers to the Orient or East,^[2] in contrast to the Occident or West, and often, as seen by the West.

"Orientalism" is widely used in art, to refer to the works of the many Western 19th century artists, who specialized in "Oriental" subjects, often drawing on their travels to Western Asia. Artists as well as scholars were already described as "Orientalists" in the 19th century, especially in France, where the term, with a rather dismissive sense, was largely popularized by the critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary.^[3] Such disdain did not prevent the Societé des Peintres Orientalistes ("Society of Orientalist Painters") being founded in 1893, with Jean-Léon Gérôme as honorary president;^[4] the word was less often used as a term for artists in 19th century England.^[5]

Since the 18th century, "Orientalist" has been the traditional term for a scholar of Oriental studies; however the use in English of "Orientalism" to describe the academic subject of "Oriental studies" is rare; the Oxford English Dictionary cites only one such usage, by Lord Byron in 1812. The academic discipline of Oriental studies is now more often called Asian studies.

In 1978, the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said published his influential and controversial book, Orientalism, which "would forever redefine" the word;^[6] he used the term to describe a pervasive Western tradition, both academic and artistic, of prejudiced outsider interpretations of the East, shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Said was critical of both this scholarly tradition and of some modern scholars, particularly Bernard Lewis. Said was mainly concerned with literature in the widest sense, especially French literature, and did not cover visual art and Orientalist painting, though others, notably Linda Nochlin, have tried to extend his analysis to art, "with uneven results".^[7] Said's work has given rise to a new discipline called Postcolonialism or Postcolonial studies.

Orientalizing styles in Europe[link]

The Moresque style of Renaissance ornament is a European adaptation of the Islamic arabesque that began in the late 15th century and was to be used in some types of work, such as bookbinding, until almost the present day. Early architectural use of motifs lifted from the Indian subcontinent has sometimes been called "Hindoo style". One of the earliest examples is the façade of Guildhall, London (1788–1789). The style gained momentum in the west with the publication of views of India by William Hodges, and William and Thomas Daniell from about 1795. Examples of "Hindoo" architecture are Sezincote House (c. 1805) in Gloucestershire, built for a nabob returned from Bengal, and the Royal Pavilion in Brighton.

Turquerie, which began as early as the late 15th century, continued until at least the 18th century, and included both the use of "Turkish" styles in the decorative arts, the adoption of Turkish costume at times, and interest in art depicting the Ottoman Empire itself. Venice, the traditional trading partner of the Ottomans, was the earliest centre, with France becoming more prominent in the 18th century.

Chinoiserie is the catch-all term for the fashion for Chinese themes in decoration in Western Europe, beginning in the late 17th century and peaking in waves, especially Rococo Chinoiserie, ca. 1740–1770. From the Renaissance to the 18th century, Western designers attempted to imitate the technical sophistication of Chinese ceramics with only partial success. Early hints of Chinoiserie appeared in the 17th century in nations with active East India companies: England (the British East India Company), Denmark (the Danish East India Company), the Netherlands (the Dutch East India Company) and France (the French East India Company). Tin-glazed pottery made at Delft and other Dutch towns adopted genuine blue-and-white Ming decoration from the early 17th century. Early ceramic wares made at Meissen and other centers of true porcelain imitated Chinese shapes for dishes, vases and teawares (see Chinese export porcelain).

Pleasure pavilions in "Chinese taste" appeared in the formal parterres of late Baroque and Rococo German palaces, and in tile panels at Aranjuez near Madrid. Thomas Chippendale's mahogany tea tables and china cabinets, especially, were embellished with fretwork glazing and railings, ca 1753–70. Sober homages to early Xing scholars' furnishings were also naturalized, as the tang evolved into a mid-Georgian side table and squared slat-back armchairs that suited English gentlemen as well as Chinese scholars. Not every adaptation of Chinese design principles falls within mainstream "chinoiserie." Chinoiserie media included imitations of lacquer and painted tin (tôle) ware that imitated japanning, early painted wallpapers in sheets, and ceramic figurines and table ornaments. Small pagodas appeared on chimneypieces and full-sized ones in gardens. Kew has a magnificent garden pagoda designed by Sir William Chambers. The Wilhelma (1846) in Stuttgart is an example of Moorish Revival architecture. Leighton House, built for the artist Lord Leighton, has a conventional facade but elaborate Arab-style interiors, including original Islamic tiles and other elements as well as Victorian Orientalizing work.

After 1860, Japonisme, sparked by the importing of Japanese woodblock prints, became an important influence in the western arts. In particular, many modern French artists such as Monet and Degas were influenced by the Japanese style. Mary Cassatt, an American artist who worked in France, used elements of combined patterns, flat planes and shifting perspective of Japanese prints in her own images.^[8] The paintings of James McNeill Whistler and his "Peacock Room" demonstrated how he used aspects of Japanese tradition and are some of the finest works of the genre. California architects Greene and Greene were inspired by Japanese elements in their design of the Gamble House and other buildings.

In architecture, Egyptian revival architecture was popular mostly in the early and mid-19th century, and Indo-Saracenic Revival architecture or Moorish Revival architecture, covering a variety of general Islamic or Indian features, in the later part of the century; "Saracenic" referred to styles from Arabic-speaking areas. Both were sometimes used in the Orient itself by colonial governments.

Orientalist art[link]

Pre-19th century[link]

Depictions of Islamic "Moors" and "Turks" (imprecisely named Muslim groups of North Africa and West Asia) can be found in Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art. In Biblical scenes in Early Netherlandish painting, secondary figures, especially Romans and Jews, were given exotic costumes that distantly reflected the clothes of the Near East. The Three Magi in Nativity scenes were an especial focus for this. Renaissance Venice had a phase of particular interest in depictions of the Ottoman Empire in painting and prints. Gentile Bellini, who travelled to Constantinople and painted the Sultan, and Vittore Carpaccio were the leading painters. By then the depictions were more accurate, with men typically dressed all in white. The depiction of Oriental carpets in Renaissance painting sometimes draws from Orientalist interest, but more often just reflects the prestige these expensive objects had in the period.^[9]

Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789) visited Istanbul and painted numerous pastels of Turkish domestic scenes; he also continued to wear Turkish dress for much of the time when back in Europe. The ambitious Scottish 18th century artist Gavin Hamilton found a solution to the problem of using modern dress, considered unheroic and inelegant, in history painting by using Middle Eastern settings with Europeans wearing local costume, as travellers were advised to do. His huge James Dawkins and Robert Wood Discovering the Ruins of Palmyra (1758, now Edinburgh) elevates tourism to the heroic, with the two travellers wearing what look very like togas. Many travellers had themselves painted in exotic Eastern dress on their return, including Lord Byron, as did many who had never left Europe, including Madame de Pompadour.^[10] Byron's poetry was highly influential in introducing Europe to the heady cocktail of Romanticism in exotic Oriental settings which was to dominate 19th century Oriental art.

French Orientalism[link]

French Orientalist painting was transformed by Napoleon's ultimately unsuccessful invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1798-1801, which stimulated great public interest in Egyptology, and was also recorded in subsequent years by Napoleon's court painters, especially Baron Gros, although the Middle Eastern campaign was not one on which he accompanied the army. Two of his most successful paintings, Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa (1804) and Battle of Abukir (1806) focus on the Emperor, as he was by then, but include many Egyptian figures, as does the less effective Napoleon at the Battle of the Pyramids (1810). Girodet's La Révolte du Caire (1810) was another large and prominent example. A well-illustrated Description de l’Égypte was published by the French Government in twenty volumes between 1809 and 1828, concentrating on antiquities.^[11]

Eugène Delacroix's first great success, The Massacre at Chios (1824) was painted before he visited the Greece or the East, and followed his friend Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa in showing a recent incident in distant parts that had aroused public opinion. Greece was still fighting for independence from the Ottomans, and was effectively as exotic as more Muslim parts of the empire. Delacroix followed up with Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1827), commemorating a siege of the previous year, and the Death of Sardanapalus, inspired by Lord Byron, which although set in antiquity has been credited with beginning the mixture of sex, violence, lassitude and exoticism which runs through much French Orientalist painting.^[12] In 1832 Delacroix finally visited what is now Algeria, recently conquered by the French, and Morocco, as part of a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco. He was greatly struck by what he saw, comparing the North African way of life to that of the Ancient Romans, and continued to paint subjects from his trip on his return to France. Like many later Orientalist painters, he was frustrated by the difficulty of sketching subjects including women, and many of his scenes feature warriors on horses, or North African Jews. However he was apparently able to get into the women's' quarters or harem of a house to sketch what became The Women of Algiers; few later harem scenes had this claim to authenticity.^[13]

When Ingres, the untravelled director of the French Académie de peinture, painted a highly coloured vision of a Turkish bath (illustration, right), he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms (who might all have been the same model.) More open sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient.^[14] This imagery persisted in art into the early 20th century, as evidenced in Matisse's orientalist semi-nudes from his Nice period, and his use of Oriental costumes and patterns. Ingres' pupil Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856) had already achieved success with his nude The Toilette of Esther (1841, Louvre) and equestrian portrait of Ali-Ben-Hamet, Caliph of Constantine and Chief of the Haractas, Followed by his Escort (1846) before he first visited the East, but in later decades the steamship made travel much easier and increasing numbers of artists travelled to the Middle East and beyond, painting a wide range of Oriental scenes.

In many of these works, they portrayed the Orient as exotic, colorful and sensual, not to say stereotyped. Such works typically concentrated on Near-Eastern Islamic cultures, as those were the ones visited by artists as France became more engaged in North Africa. French artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painted many works depicting Islamic culture, often including lounging odalisques. They stressed both lassitude and visual spectacle. Other scenes, especially in genre painting, have been seen as either closely comparable to their equivalents set in modern-day or historical Europe, or as also reflecting an Orientalist mind-set in the Saidian sense of the term. Gérôme was the precursor, and often the master, of a number of French painters in the later part of the century whose works were often frankly salacious, frequently featuring scenes in harems, public baths and slave auctions (the last two also available with classical decor), and responsible, with others, for "the equation of Orientalism with the nude in pornographic mode".^[15]

British Orientalism[link]

William Holman Hunt, A Street Scene in Cairo; The Lantern-Maker's Courtship, 1854-61

Though British political interest in the territories of the unravelling Ottoman Empire was as intense as in France, it was mostly more discreetly exercised. The origins of British Orientalist 19th century painting owe more to religion than military conquest or the search for plausible locations for naked females. The leading British genre painter, Sir David Wilkie was 55 when he travelled to Istanbul and Jerusalem in 1840, dying off Gibraltar during the return voyage. Though not noted as a religious painter, Wilkie made the trip with a Protestant agenda to reform religious painting, as he believed that: "a Martin Luther in painting is as much called for as in theology, to sweep away the abuses by which our divine pursuit is encumbered", by which he meant traditional Christian iconography. He hoped to find more authentic settings and decor for Biblical subjects at their original location, though his death prevented more than studies being made. Other artists including the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt and David Roberts had similar motivations,^[16] giving an emphasis on realism in British Orientalist art from the start.^[17] The French artist James Tissot also used contemporary Middle Eastern landscape and decor for Biblical subjects, with little attempt at historicising costumes or other fittings.

William Holman Hunt produced a number of major paintings of Biblical subjects drawing on his Middle Eastern travels, improvising variants of contemporary Arab costume and furnishings to avoid specifically Islamic styles, and also some landscapes and genre subjects. The biblical subjects included The Scapegoat (1856), The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860), and The Shadow of Death (1871). The Miracle of the Holy Fire (1899) was intended as a picturesque satire on the local Eastern Christians, of whom, like most English visitors, Hunt took a very dim view. His A Street Scene in Cairo; The Lantern-Maker's Courtship (1854–61) is a rare contemporary narrative scene, as the young man feels his fiancé's face, which he is not allowed to see, through her veil, as an Westerner in the background beats his way up the street with his stick.^[18] This a rare intrusion of a clearly contemporary figure into a Orientalist scene; mostly they claim the picturesqueness of the historical painting so popular at the time, without the trouble of researching authentic costumes and settings.

When Gérôme exhibited For Sale; Slaves at Cairo at the Royal Academy in London in 1871, it was "widely found offensive", perhaps partly because the British liked to think they had successfully suppressed the slave trade in Egypt, also for cruelty and "representing fleshiness for its own sake".^[19] But Rana Kabbani believes that "French Orientalist painting, as exemplified by the works of Gérôme, may appear more sensual, gaudy, gory and sexually explicit than its British counterpart, but this is a difference of style not substance ... Similar strains of fascination and repulsion convulsed their artists"^[20] Nonetheless, nudity and violence are more evident in British paintings set in the ancient world, and "the iconography of the odalisque ... the Oriental sex slave whose image is offered up to the viewer as freely as she herself supposedly was to her master - is almost entirely French in origin",^[21] though taken up with enthusiasm by Italian and other painters.

John Frederick Lewis, who lived for several years in a traditional mansion in Cairo, painted highly detailed works showing both realistic genre scenes of Middle Eastern life and more idealized scenes in upper class Egyptian interiors with no traces of Western cultural influence yet apparent. His very careful and loving representation of Islamic architecture, furnishings, screens, and costumes set new standards of realism, which influenced other artists, including Gérôme in his later works. He "never painted a nude", and his wife modelled for several of his harem scenes,^[22] which, with the rare examples by the classicist painter Lord Leighton, imagine "the harem as a place of almost English domesticity, ... [where]... women's fully clothed respectability suggests a moral healthiness to go with their natural good looks".^[23]

English and French harems

• 

  Ingres, Odalisque and slave-girl, 1842

• 

  Fernand Cormon, Murder in the Seraglio, 1872

• 

  Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Pool in a Harem, c. 1876

• 

  John Frederick Lewis, The Reception, 1873

• 

  Frederick Goodall, A New Light in the Harem, 1884

Other artists concentrated on landscape painting, often of desert scenes, including Richard Dadd and Edward Lear. David Roberts (1796–1864) produced architectural and landscape views, many of antiquities, and published very successful books of lithographs from them.^[24]

Elsewhere[link]

Russian Orientalist art was largely concerned with the areas of Central Asia that Russia was conquering during the century, and also in historical painting with the Mongols who had dominated Russia for much of the Middle Ages, who were rarely shown in a good light. Nationalist historical painting in Central Europe and the Balkans dwelt on Turkish oppression, with battle scenes and maidens about to be raped.

The Saidian analysis has not prevented a strong revival of interest in, and collecting of, 19th century Orientalist works since the 1970s, the latter in large part led by Middle Eastern buyers,^[25]

Orientalist artists[link]

• Gustave Boulanger (1824-88)
  

  

  Algerian shops, by Louis Comfort Tiffany
  

  

  Samarkand, by Richard-Karl Karlovitch Zommer
  

  

  The midday meal, Cairo, by John Frederick Lewis
• Eduard Charlemont (1848-1906)
• Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856)
• Richard Dadd (1817–1886)
• Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
• Ludwig Deutsch (1855–1935)
• Alphonse Étienne Dinet
• Edmund Dulac
• Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876)
• Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904)
• Gustave Achille Guillaumet (1840-1887)
• William Holman Hunt (1827–1910)
• Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867)
• Edward Lear (1812–1888)
• Frederic Leighton (1830–1896)
• John Frederick Lewis (1805–1876)
• Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789)
• Edwin Longsden Long, a specialist in Ancient Egyptian scenes
• Alberto Pasini (1826–1899)
• Théodore Ralli (1852–1909)
• David Roberts (painter) (1796–1864)
• Alexandre Roubtzoff (1884–1949)

The Discussion (Giulio Rosati)

• Giulio Rosati (1858–1917)
• James Tissot (1836–1902)
• David Wilkie (1785–1841)
• Jean-Baptiste van Mour (1671–1731)
• Ecem Kafadar (1885–1940)
• Edwin Lord Weeks (1849–1903)
• Adolf Schreyer (1828–1899)

Literature and music[link]

Authors and composers are not commonly referred to as "Orientalist" in the way that artists are, and relatively few specialized in Oriental topics or styles, or are even best known for their works including them. But many major figures, from Mozart to Flaubert, have produced significant works with Oriental subjects or treatments. For example, Verdi's opera Aida (1871) is set in Egypt as portrayed through the content and the visual spectacle. "Aida" depicts a militaristic Egypt's tyranny over Ethiopia.^[26]

In music, Orientalism may be applied to styles occurring in different periods, such as the alla Turca, used by multiple composers including Mozart and Beethoven.^[27] Orientalism is also traceable in music that is considered to have effects of exoticism, including the japonisme in Claude Debussy's piano music all the way to the sitar being used in recordings by The Beatles.^[28]

In his novel Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert used ancient Carthage in North Africa as a foil to ancient Rome. He portrayed its culture as morally corrupting and suffused with dangerously alluring eroticism. This novel proved hugely influential on later portrayals of ancient Semitic cultures.

The use of the Orient as an exotic backdrop continued in the movies, for instance, those featuring Rudolph Valentino. Later the rich Arab in robes became a more popular theme, especially during the oil crisis of the 1970s. In the 1990s the Arab terrorist became a common villain figure in Western movies.

Examples[link]

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This section may contain excessive, poor or irrelevant examples. You can improve the article by adding more descriptive text and removing less pertinent examples. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for further suggestions. (June 2010)

Literature[link]

• The Travels of Marco Polo, 13th century
• Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 14th century invented account of travels.
• Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, 1588/89
• John Dryden, Aureng-zebe (1675), a heroic drama in theory based on the life of the reigning Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb
• Montesquieu — Persian Letters (Lettres persanes) (1721)
• William Thomas Beckford — Vathek (1786)
• Robert Southey — Thalaba the Destroyer (1801)
• Robert Southey — Curse of Kehama (1810)
• Lord Byron — The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour, Don Juan and other works
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Kubla Khan (published 1816)
• Thomas Moore — Lalla-Rookh (published 1817)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Westöstlicher Diwan (1819)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — poem Indian Superstition (1821)
• Edgar Allan Poe — Tamerlane (1827), Al Aaraaf (1829), and Israfel (1831)
• Victor Hugo — Les Orientales (1829)
• Gustave Flaubert — Salammbô (1862)
• Eça de Queiroz — The Relic (A Relíquia) (1887) and The Mandarin (O Mandarim) (1889)
• Anatole France — Thaïs (1890)
• Edward FitzGerald - "translation" or adaptation of the Persian Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859)
• Pierre Loti (1850–1923) - highly popular French writer, mostly on his Oriental travels & novels set as far away as Japan and Tahiti
• Richard Francis Burton — translation of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (1885–1888)
• Leo Tolstoy — Hadji Murat (1912)
• Victor Segalen — René Leys (1922)
• Herman Hesse — Siddhartha (1922)
• André Malraux — Man's Fate (1934) (La Condition humaine, 1933)
• Marguerite Yourcenar's Nouvelles Orientales (1938)

Opera, ballets, musicals[link]

Costume design for Aida by Auguste Mariette (1871)

Theatre poster for The Mikado

• Antonio Lucio Vivaldi — Juditha triumphans (1716)
• Georg Friedrich Händel — Tamerlano (1724) and Serse (1738)
• Jean-Philippe Rameau — Les Indes Galantes (1735–1736)
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782)
• Gioachino Rossini — Semiramide (1823)
• Giuseppe Verdi — Nabucco (1842)
• Jacques Offenbach — Ba-ta-clan (1855)
• Georges Bizet — Les Pêcheurs de Perles (1863)
• Giuseppe Verdi — Aida (1871)
• Emmanuel Chabrier — Fisch-Ton-Kan (1875)
• César Cui — The Mandarin's Son (1878)
• Gilbert and Sullivan — The Mikado (1885)
• Alexander Borodin — Prince Igor (1890)
• Sidney Jones — The Geisha (1896)
• Sidney Jones — San Toy (1899)
• Pietro Mascagni — Iris (1899)
• Howard Talbot — A Chinese Honeymoon (1896)
• Giacomo Puccini — Madama Butterfly (1904)
• Richard Strauss — Salome, opera in one act based on Wilde's play (1905)
• Giacomo Puccini — Turandot (1926)
• Franz Lehár - The Land of Smiles (1929)
• Sigmund Romberg, Oscar Hammerstein II & Otto Harbach — The Desert Song (1926) and film (1929)
• Richard Strauss — Die ägyptische Helena, opera with libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1929)

Orchestral works[link]

• Mily Balakirev — Tamara.
• Alexander Borodin — In the Steppes of Central Asia; "Polovetsian Dances" from Prince Igor.
• Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov — Caucasian Sketches.
• Modest Mussorgsky — "Dance of the Persian Slaves" from Khovanshchina.
• Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — Antar; Scheherezade.

Shorter musical pieces[link]

• Mily Balakirev — Islamey
• Ludwig van Beethoven—Turkish March from The Ruins of Athens, opus 113 (1811)
• Johann Joseph Fux - partita Turcaria, inspired by the 1683 Siege of Vienna by the Turks.^[29]
• Alexander Glazunov - 5 Novelettes for String Quartet, Op 15
• Albert Ketèlbey — In a Persian Market (1920), In a Chinese Temple Garden (1925), and In the Mystic Land of Egypt (1931)
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—Rondo alla turca from Piano Sonata No.11 (K.331)
• Sergei Rachmaninoff — Oriental Sketch (1917)

Theatre[link]

• Tobias Bamberg's magic stage act as "Okito" (Germany, 1893 – United States, 1908)
• Oscar Wilde's Salomé (1893, first performed in Paris 1896)
• Alexander's mentalism stage act (United States, c. 1890s–1910s)
• William Ellsworth Robinson's, magic stage act as "Chung Ling Soo" (United States, 1900–1918)

Photography[link]

Photograph of Cairo by Francis Frith, 1856.

• Roger Fenton
• Francis Frith

Pulp magazines[link]

Cover of Oriental Stories (Spring 1932).

• Oriental Stories: A pulp magazine published 1930–34 by Chicago based Popular Fiction specialising in Orientalist fiction. The title was later changed to The Magic Carpet Magazine.

Films[link]

• Intolerance (1916)
• Broken Blossoms (1919)
• The Sheik (1921)
• The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)
• The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
• My Geisha (1962)
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
• Sex and the City 2 (2010)^[30]

Comics[link]

• The Adventures of Tintin (1929–1983)
• The Upside Down Circle by Don Gilbert (1990).
• Dragon and Tiger (2008)
• Habibi (2011)

Design by Léon Cogniet for a ceiling decoration in the Louvre depicting the 1798 Egyptian Expedition.

Eastern views of the West[link]

Much of Said's criticism of Western "Orientalism" is based on particularizing trends also present in Asian works by Indian, Chinese and Japanese writers and artists, in their views of Western culture and tradition. The term Occidentalism has sometimes been used to refer to negative or stereotypical views of the Western world found in Eastern societies.

Although the core of Said's criticism of the concept of "Orientalism" implies a Western view of Eastern culture, some Eastern artists adopted Western styles that particularize Eastern peoples. The Indian painter Ravi Varma painted several works that are virtually indistinguishable from some Western "Orientalist" images.^{[citation needed]}

In the late 20th century many Western cultural themes and images began appearing in Asian art and culture, especially in Japan. English words and phrases are prominent in Japanese advertising and popular culture, and many Japanese anime are written around characters, settings, themes, and mythological figures derived from various Western cultural traditions.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

• Arabist
• Black orientalism
• Circassian beauties
• Exoticism
• Occidentalism
• Chinoiserie
• Black Athena

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Beard, David and Kenneth Gloag. 2005. Musicology: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge.
• Harding, James, Artistes Pompiers: French Academic Art in the 19th Century, 1979, Academy Editions, ISBN 856704512
• C F Ives, "The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints", 1974, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ISBN 0-87099-098-5
• King, Donald and Sylvester, David eds. The Eastern Carpet in the Western World, From the 15th to the 17th century, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1983, ISBN 0-7287-0362-9
• Mack, Rosamond E. Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600, University of California Press, 2001 ISBN 0-520-22131-1
• Meagher, Jennifer. Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. online, accessed April 11, 2011
• Nochlin, Linda, The Imaginary Orient, 1983, page numbers from reprint in The nineteenth-century visual culture reader, google books, a reaction to Rosenthal's exhibition and book.
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 ISBN 0-394-74067-X).
• Tromans, Nicholas, and others, The Lure of the East, British Orientalist Painting, 2008, Tate Publishing, ISBN 978-1-85437-733-3

Further reading[link]

• Springer, Simon. 2011, Culture of violence or violent Orientalism? Neoliberalisation and imagining the 'savage other' in post-transitional Cambodia. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (3), 305-319.
• Weir, David. American Orient: Imagining the East From the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century (University of Massachusetts Press; 2011) 304 pages;

Mainly on art[link]

• Jean-Marc Aractingi,"Peintres Orientalistes" Editions Vues d'Orient,Paris,2003
• Peltre, Christine. Orientalism in Art. New York: Abbeville Publishing Group (Abbeville Press, Inc.), 1998 (ISBN 0-7892-0459-2).
• Rosenthal, Donald A. Orientalism: The Near East in French Painting, 1800–1880. Rochester, N.Y.: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1982.
• Stevens, Mary Anne, ed. The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse: European Painters in North Africa and the Near East. Exhibition catalogue. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1984
• Benjamin, Roger Orientalist Aesthetics, Art, Colonialism and French North Africa: 1880-1930, U. of California Press, 2003

Literature[link]

• Halliday, Fred. "'Orientalism' and Its Critics", British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2. (1993), pp. 145–163.
• Irwin, Robert. For lust of knowing: The Orientalists and their enemies. London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2006 (ISBN 0-7139-9415-0)
• Kabbani, Rana. Imperial Fictions: Europe's Myths of Orient. London: Pandora Press, 1994 (ISBN 0-04-440911-7).
• Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003 (ISBN 0-520-22469-8; paperback, ISBN 0-520-23230-5).
• Knight, Nathaniel. "Grigor'ev in Orenburg, 1851–1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?", Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 1. (Spring, 2000), pp. 74–100.
• Kontje, Todd. German Orientalisms. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004 (ISBN 0-472-11392-5).
• Little, Douglas. American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945. (2nd ed. 2002 ISBN 1-86064-889-4).
• López-Calvo, Ignacio, ed. Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007 (ISBN 1-84718-143-0)
• López-Calvo, Ignacio, ed. One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the "Oriental" in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009 (ISBN: 1-4438-1657-4)
• López-Calvo, Ignacio, ed. Peripheral Transmodernities: South-to-South Dialogues between the Luso-Hispanic World and "the Orient." Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. (ISBN 1-4438-3714-8)
• Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992 (ISBN 978-0-8014-8195-6).
• Macfie, Alexander Lyon. Orientalism. White Plains, NY: Longman, 2002 (ISBN 0-582-42386-4).
• MacKenzie, John. Orientalism: History, theory and the arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995 (ISBN 0-7190-4578-9), google books.
• Murti, Kamakshi P. India: The Seductive and Seduced "Other" of German Orientalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001 (ISBN 0-313-30857-8).
• Noble dreams, wicked pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930 by Holly Edwards (Editor). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000 (ISBN 0-691-05004-X).
• Oueijan, Naji. The Progress of an Image: The East in English Literature. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 1996.
• Schlicht, Alfred, "Die Araber und Europa", Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 2008

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Orientalism

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Orientalist paintings

Look up orientalism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• The Orientalist Painters
• The Orientalists' Art Works Gallery
• Orientalism 25 Years Later, by Said in 2003
• "China in Western Thought and Culture" Dictionary of the History of Ideas, etext, University of Virginia
• Brian Whitaker, "Distorting Desire", review, Joseph Abbad, Desiring Arabs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, from Al-Bab.com, on Reflections of a Renegade blog site
• Martin Kramer, "Edward Said's Splash", from his book, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Washington: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001, pp. 27–43.
• Andre Gingrich, "Frontier Orientalism", Camp Catatonia blog
• Orientalism in the "History of Art", All Art
• Orientalist art and photography, London Times Online
• "Alexander Roubtzoff" (1884–1949), Artistic Association Alexander Roubtzoff
• "Edward Said and the Production of Knowledge", CitizenTrack
• Articles & Analysis on Orientalists' Art Works

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Edward Wadie Saïd (Arabic pronunciation: [wædiːʕ sæʕiːd] Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد‎, Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. Said was a Palestinian born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) and held an American passport. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism.^[1] Robert Fisk described him as the Palestinians' "most powerful political voice."^[2]

Said was an influential^[3][4] cultural critic and author, known best for his book Orientalism (1978). The book presented his influential^[5][6] ideas on Orientalism, the Western study of Eastern cultures. Said contended that Orientalist scholarship was and continues to be inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, making much of the work inherently politicized, servile to power, and therefore suspect. Grounding much of this thesis in his intimate knowledge of colonial literature such as the fiction of Conrad, and in the post-structuralist theory of Foucault, Derrida and others, Said's Orientalism and following works proved influential in literary theory and criticism, and continue to influence several other fields in the humanities. Orientalism affected Middle Eastern studies in particular, transforming the way practitioners of the discipline describe and examine the Middle East.^[7] Said came to discuss and vigorously debate the issue of Orientalism with scholars in the fields of history and area studies, many of whom disagreed with his thesis, including most famously Bernard Lewis.^[8]

Said also came to be known as a public intellectual who frequently discussed contemporary politics, music, culture, and literature, in lectures, newspaper and magazine columns, and books. Drawing on his own experience as a Palestinian growing up in a Palestinian Christian family in the Middle East at the time of the creation of Israel, Said argued for the creation of a Palestinian state, equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return, and for increased pressure on Israel, especially by the United States. He also criticized several Arab and Muslim regimes.^[9] Having received a Western education in the U.S., where he lived from his high school years until his death, Said tried to use his dual heritage, the subject of his prize-winning memoir Out of Place (1999), to bridge the gap between the West and the Middle East and to improve the situation in Israel-Palestine. He was a member of the Palestinian National Council for over a decade and his pro-Palestinian activism made him a figure of considerable controversy.^[10]

With his friend Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the award-winning West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of children from Israel, the Palestinian territories, and surrounding Arab nations. It opened in 1999. Said was also an accomplished pianist.^[11] In 2002, he and Barenboim published a book of their earlier conversations on music, titled Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. Active until his last months, Said died in 2003 after a decade-long battle with leukemia.

Early life[link]

Edward Said and his sister, Rosemarie, 1940

Said was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935.^[12] His father, a U.S. citizen with Protestant Palestinian origins, was a businessman and had served under General Pershing in World War I. He moved to Cairo in the decade before Edward's birth. His mother, born in Nazareth, also had a Protestant background^[13][14] and was half-Lebanese.^[15] His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan.

Said lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until age 12.^[16] He attended the Anglican St. George's Academy in 1947 in Jerusalem.^{[nb 1]} As the Arab League declared war on Israel in 1947/1948, his family moved from the neighborhood of Talbiya in Jerusalem and returned to Cairo. In a London Review of Books article, Said gave a more detailed account of his upbringing:

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.^[16]

Said attended Victoria College in Alexandria at the same time as Michel Shaloub, later to be known as Omar Sharif. He recalled the future film star was both sadistic and physically abusive in his capacity as "head boy". ^[26] In 1951, Said was expelled from the college for being a "troublemaker". ^[16] Consequently his parents sent him to Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite college preparatory school in Massachusetts; he recalled it was a "miserable" year of feeling "out of place", yet Said managed to do well in the school, 'achieving the rank of either first or second in a class of about a hundred and sixty'.^[16]. Said later reflected that the decision to send him so far away was heavily influenced by 'the prospects of deracinated people like us being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible'.^[16] These themes of interweaving cultures, feeling out of place, and being far from home affected Said dissonantly and would echo through Said's work for the rest of his life.^[16]

Fluent in English, French, and Arabic,^[27] Said earned a Bachelor of Arts (1957) from Princeton University, and a Master of Arts (1960) and a Ph.D. (1964) in English Literature from Harvard University.^[28]

Career[link]

In 1963, Saïd joined the faculty of Columbia University, in the departments of English and Comparative Literature, where he served until his death in 2003. In 1974 he was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, in 1975–6 Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford, and in 1977, Saïd became the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and subsequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1979, Saïd was Visiting Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.^[29] Saïd was also a visiting professor at Yale University and lectured at more than 100 universities.^[30] In 1992, he attained the rank of University Professor, Columbia's highest academic position.^[31] He lived near campus in The Colosseum on Riverside Drive.

Saïd also served as president of the Modern Language Association, editor of the Arab Studies Quarterly, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the executive board of PEN, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, the Council of Foreign Relations,^[29] and the American Philosophical Society.^[32]

In 1993, Said was invited to present the BBC's annual Reith Lectures. In a series of six talks, entitled Representation of the Intellectual^[33] he examined the role of public intellectuals in modern society. The BBC made these lectures available to the public in July 2011.^[34]

Saïd's writing regularly appeared in The Nation,^[35] The Guardian,^[35] the London Review of Books,^[36] Le Monde Diplomatique,^[37] Counterpunch,^[38] Al Ahram,^[39] and the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat.^[35] His writings have been translated into twentysix languages^[40] and the themes of his writings included literature, politics, the Middle East, music, and culture.

Literary criticism[link]

After expanding on his thesis to produce his first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), Said, swirling with a wealth of ideas he received from studying the works of Giambattista Vico and others, presented his award-winning second book, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974), a work on the theoretical underpinnings of literary critical projects.^[41] Other literary critical texts by Said include The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994), and the posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004) and On Late Style (2006).

Fascinated, like his postmodern influences, with how people perceive things in cultural contexts, and by the effects of society, politics and power on literature, Said is considered a founder of postcolonial criticism. His work on Orientalism is particularly important, but his interpretations of Conrad, Jane Austen,^[42] Rudyard Kipling,^[43] Yeats,^[44] and other writers have also proven influential among critics.

"Orientalism"[link]

Said is most famous for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as the inaccuracies that are the foundation of Western thought toward the East. In his most famous book, Orientalism (1978), Said claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."^[45] He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and the U.S.'s colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the U.S. and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

In Orientalism, the book, Said asserted that much western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism bent on self-affirmation rather than objective study,^[47] a method of discrimination, and a tool of imperialist domination.^[45] Orientalism had an impact on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and human geography, and to a lesser extent on those of history and oriental studies. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. Tibawi,^[48] Anouar Abdel-Malek,^[49] Maxime Rodinson,^[50] and Richard William Southern,^[51] Said argued that Western writings on the Orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, are suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning and sympathetic Western ‘Orientalists’ (a term that he transformed into a pejorative):^[52]

Said argued that the West has stereotyped the East in art and literature, since antiquity – such as the composition of The Persians by Aeschylus.^[54] Even more so in modern times, Europe has dominated Asia politically so that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias that Western scholars could not recognize. Western scholars appropriated the task of exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves, with the implication that the East was not capable of composing its own narrative. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its modern identities from a perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient deviates.^[55]

Said concluded that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East that can be attributed to immutable "essences" in the Oriental make-up.^[56] In 1978, when the book was first published, with memories of the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC crisis still fresh, Said argued that these attitudes still permeated the Western media and academia.^[57] After stating the central thesis, Orientalism consists mainly of supporting examples from Western texts.

Criticism[link]

Orientalism and other works by Said sparked a wide variety of controversy and criticism.^[58] Ernest Gellner argued that Said's contention that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, noting that until the late 17th century the Ottoman Empire had posed a serious threat to Europe.^[59] Mark Proudman notes that Said had claimed that the British Empire extended from Egypt to India in the 1880s, when in fact the Ottoman and Persian Empires intervened.^[60] Others argued out that even at the height of the imperial era, European power in the East was never absolute, and remained heavily dependent on local collaborators, who were frequently subversive of imperial aims.^[61] Another criticism is that the areas of the Middle East on which Said had concentrated, including Palestine and Egypt, were poor examples for his theory, as they came under direct European control only for a relatively short period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These critics suggested that Said devoted much less attention to more apt examples, including the British Raj in India, and Russia’s dominions in Asia, because Said was more interested in making political points about the Middle East.^[62]

Strong criticism of Said's critique of Orientalism came from academic Orientalists, including some of Eastern backgrounds. Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis,^[63][64] and Kanan Makiya addressed what Keddie retrospectively calls "some unfortunate consequences" of Said's Orientalism on the perception and status of their scholarship.^{[nb 2]} Bernard Lewis in particular was often at odds with Said following the publication of Orientalism, in which Said singled out Lewis as a "perfect exemplification" of an "Establishment Orientalist" whose work "purports to be objective liberal scholarship but is in reality very close to being propaganda against his subject material".^[67] Lewis answered with several essays in response, and was joined by other scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Aijaz Ahmad, and William Montgomery Watt, who also regarded Orientalism as a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship.^[68]

Some of Said's academic critics argue that Said made no attempt to distinguish between writers of very different types: such as on the one hand the poet Goethe (who never travelled in the East), the novelist Flaubert (who briefly toured Egypt), Ernest Renan (whose work is widely regarded as tainted by racism), and on the other scholars such as Edward William Lane who was fluent in Arabic.^[69] According to these critics, their common European origins and attitudes overrode such considerations in Said's mind; Said constructed a stereotype of Europeans.^[70] The critic Robert Irwin writes that Said ignored the domination of 19th century Oriental studies by Germans and Hungarians, from countries that did not possess an Eastern empire.^[71]

Such critics accuse Said of creating a monolithic "Occidentalism" to oppose to the "Orientalism" of Western discourse, arguing that he failed to distinguish between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment; that he ignored the widespread and fundamental differences of opinion among western scholars of the Orient; that he failed to acknowledge that many Orientalists (such as William Jones) were more concerned with establishing kinship between East and West than with creating "difference", and who had often made discoveries that would provide the foundations for anti-colonial nationalism.^[72] More generally, critics argue that Said and his followers fail to distinguish between Orientalism in the media and popular culture (for instance the portrayal of the Orient in such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and academic studies of Oriental languages, literature, history and culture by Western scholars (whom, it is argued, they tar with the same brush).^[73][74]

Said's critics argue that by making ethnicity and cultural background the test of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Said drew attention to the question of his own identity as a Palestinian and as a "Subaltern".^[75] Given Said's largely Anglophone upbringing and education at an elite school in Cairo, the fact that he spent most of his adult life in the United States, and his prominent position in American academia, his own arguments that "any and all representations … are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer … [and are] interwoven with a great many other things besides the 'truth', which is itself a representation"^[76] could be said to disenfranchise him from writing about the Orient himself. Hence these critics claim that the excessive relativism of Said and his followers trap them in a "web of solipsism",^[77] unable to talk of anything but "representations", and denying the existence of any objective truth.

In 1985, the Jewish Defense League called Said a "Nazi". That same year, someone set fire to his office at Columbia. Said and his family were recipients of death threats throughout his life.^[78]

Supporters[link]

Said’s supporters argue that such criticisms, even if correct, do not invalidate his basic thesis, which they say still holds true for the 19th and 20th centuries and in particular for general representations of the Orient in Western media, literature and film.^[79] His supporters point out that Said himself acknowledges limitations of his study's failing to address German scholarship^[80] and that, in the "Afterword" to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he, in their view, convincingly refutes his critics, such as Lewis.^[81] Orientalism is regarded as central to the postcolonial movement, encouraging scholars "from non-western countries…to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating themselves with 'narratives of oppression,' creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the non-western 'other.'"^[82]

Said's importance in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies is represented by his influence on scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash,^[83] Nicholas Dirks,^[84] and Ronald Inden,^[85] and Cambodia, such as Simon Springer,^[86] and literary theorists such as Hamid Dabashi, Homi Bhabha^[87] and Gayatri Spivak.^[88] His work continues to be widely discussed in academic seminars, disciplinary conferences, and scholarship.^[7]

Influence[link]

Both supporters and critics of Edward Said acknowledge the profound, transformative influence that his book Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the humanities. But whereas his critics regret his influence as limiting,^[89] his supporters praise his influence as liberating.^[90] Postcolonial theory, of which Said is regarded as a founder and a figure of continual relevance,^[1] continues to attract interest and is a thriving field in the humanities.^[91] Orientalism continues to profoundly inform the field of Middle Eastern studies.^[7] He was a prominent public intellectual in the United States, praised widely as an "intellectual superstar," engaging in music criticism, public lectures, media punditry, contemporary politics, and musical performance.^[82] His breadth of influence is regarded as "genuinely global," resting on his unique and innovative blend of cultural criticism, politics, and literary theory.^[7]

Milica Bakić-Hayden based her concept of Nesting Orientalisms on the ideas of historian Larry Wollf and Edward Said's Orientalism.^[92] Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova introduced another concept, a concept of "nesting balkanisms", which is related to concept of "nesting orientalisms".^[93]

Music[link]

Being not only an avid music lover, but also an accomplished pianist,^[94] Said wrote extensively about music, including being the music critic for The Nation for several years,^[95] and writing three books on music: Musical Elaborations, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (with the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim), and his last book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. In music, Said often saw a reflection of his ideas on literature and history, and he would find real life possibilities in bold composition and performance. A posthumous collection of essays was published in 2007 by Columbia University Press, entitled Music at the Limits.^[96][97]

The music of Arab American composer Mohammed Fairouz has been deeply influenced by the writings of Said. Fairouz's First Symphony references the essay Homage to a Belly Dancer and his Piano Sonata is titled Reflections on Exile after the collection of essays by Said.^[98]

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim

In 1999, Said jointly founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Barenboim. The award-winning youth orchestra is made up of musicians from Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding Arab countries, and has performed internationally, including within both Israel and Palestine. Said and Barenboim also worked together to establish The Barenboim-Said Foundation in Seville. The government-funded foundation was eventually constituted in 2004 with its purpose being to develop several "education through music" projects. In addition to managing the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Barenboim-Said Foundation assists with other projects such as the Academy of Orchestral Studies, the Musical Education in Palestine project and the Early Childhood Musical Education Project in Seville.^[99]

Politics[link]

Pro-Palestinian activism[link]

Throughout his adult life, Said involved himself in the effort for Palestinians statehood. From 1977 until 1991, he was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council.^[100] He was also an early proponent of a two-state solution and, in 1988, voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine at a Palestinian National Council meeting in Algiers. In 1991, he quit the PNC in protest over the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords, feeling that the terms of the accord were unacceptable and had been rejected by the Madrid round negotiators. He felt that Oslo would not lead to a truly independent state and was inferior to a plan Yasir Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the United States government in the late 1970s.^[101] In particular, he wrote that Arafat had sold short the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel and ignored the growing presence of Israeli settlements. Said's relationship with the Palestinian Authority was once so bad in 1995 that PA leaders banned the sale of his books,^[102] but improved when he hailed Arafat for rejecting Ehud Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit.^[103]

In an article entitled Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, he argued for the legitimacy and authenticity of both the Zionist claim to a land (and, more importantly, the Zionist claim that the Jewish people needed a homeland) and Palestinian rights of self-determination.^[104] Said's books on the issue of Israel and the Palestinians include The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994) and The End of the Peace Process (2000).

A photograph taken on July 3, 2000, of Said in South Lebanon throwing a stone across the Lebanon–Israel border drew criticism from some political and media commentators, some of whom decried the act as "terrorist sympathizing.".^[106] Said explained the act as a stone-throwing contest with his son, and called it a symbolic gesture of joy at the end of Israel's occupation of Lebanon. "It was a pebble. There was nobody there. The guardhouse was at least half a mile away."^[107] Although he denied aiming the rock at anyone, an eyewitness account in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir asserted that Said had been less than 30 feet (9.1 m) from Israeli soldiers manning a two-story watchtower when he aimed the rock over the border fence, though it instead hit barbed wire.^[108] While the photo provoked criticism from some Columbia University faculty members, some students, and from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the Columbia provost issued a five-page letter defending Said's act on the grounds of freedom of expression: "To my knowledge, the stone was directed at no one; no law was broken; no indictment was made; no criminal or civil action has been taken against Professor Said."^[109] Said said that there were repercussions, however, noting that in February 2001 the Freud Society of Vienna cancelled an invitation for him to give a lecture.^[110] The president of the Freud Society cited "the political situation in the Middle East and its consequences" as a reason, going on to explain that antisemitism "has become more dangerous" in Austrian politics and that the Society had decided on the cancellation "to avoid an internal clash."^[107]

Said made a documentary film about Palestine for BBC named In Search of Palestine.^[111] BBC was unsuccessful in getting it on U.S. television.^[112]

In Culture and Resistance (2003), Said likened his situation to that of Noam Chomsky: "It's very similar to him. He's a well known, great linguist. He's been celebrated and honored for that. But he's also vilified as an anti-Semite and a Hitler worshiper." Said went on to explain:

For anyone to deny the horrendous experience of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is unacceptable. We don't want anybody's history of suffering to go unrecorded and unacknowledged. On the other hand, there's a great difference between acknowledging Jewish oppression and using that as a cover for the oppression of another people.^[113]

In 2003, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti, helped establish the Palestinian National Initiative, or Al-Mubadara, an attempt to build a third force in Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to Fatah and Hamas. Three years later, in January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records reveal that Said was under FBI surveillance as early as 1971. No records were available on the last dozen years of his life.^[114]

Criticism of U.S. foreign policy[link]

In a 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said criticized what he viewed as the biased reporting of the Western press and, in particular, media “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.”^[115] Said opposed many U.S. foreign policy endeavors in the Middle East and elsewhere. He critiqued U.S. involvement in Kosovo and Iraq under President Clinton,^[11] and U.S. support for Israel was a constant topic that he addressed in his activism. Although growing increasingly weak from his battle with leukemia, Said spent many of his last months speaking out against the then recent invasion of Iraq.^[116] In an April 2003 interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Said argued that the Iraq War was ill-conceived:

My strong opinion, though I don't have any proof in the classical sense of the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East and the Arab world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist groups they dislike and install regimes friendly to the United States. I think this is a dream that has very little basis in reality. The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is to say the least out of date and widely speculative….

I don't think the planning for the post-Saddam, post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. U.S. Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith testified in Congress about a month ago and seemed to have no figures and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy; they had no idea about the use of institutions that exist, although they want to de-Ba'thise the higher echelons and keep the rest.

The same is true about their views of the army. They certainly have no use for the Iraqi opposition that they've been spending many millions of dollars on. And to the best of my ability to judge, they are going to improvise. Of course the model is Afghanistan. I think they hope that the UN will come in and do something, but given the recent French and Russian positions I doubt that that will happen with such simplicity.^[117]

Death and tributes[link]

An al-Mubadara memorial poster of Edward Said on the Israeli West Bank wall

Edward Said died at age 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a 12 year-long battle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.^[118] He was survived by his wife of 33 years, Mariam (née Cortas); a son, Wadie, and a daughter, Najla, an actress, playwright, and founding member of the Arab-American theatre collective Nibras.^{[119][120][121]}

Subsequently, several prominent writers published eulogies for Said, including Alexander Cockburn,^[122] Christopher Hitchens,^[123] Tony Judt,^[124] Michael Wood,^[125] and Tariq Ali.^[126]

In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Said's honor.^[127]

In 2008, Verso Books published Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said, a book of essays by 15 authors, including Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid Khalidi and Elias Khoury. The book was edited by Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Bașak Ertür.^[128][129]

A critical memoir, Edward Said: the charisma of criticism, by H. Aram Veeser was published by Routledge in March 2010.

In August 2010, the University of California Press published a large volume of essays by some 29 authors about every aspect of Said's intellectual contributions. Edited by Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representations includes interviews with Noam Chomsky, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Daniel Barenboim, as well as the writings of Joseph Massad, Jacqueline Rose, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Ella Shohat, Asha Varadhjan, RR Radhakrishnan, Ardi Imseis, Ghada Karmi, Sabry Hafez and many others.

Edward Said memorial lectures[link]

Since Said's death in 2003, several institutions have instituted annual lecture series in his memory, including Columbia University, University of Warwick, Princeton University, University of Adelaide, American University of Cairo, and Palestine Center, with such notables speaking as Daniel Barenboim, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and Cornel West.

Bibliography[link]

Awards[link]

Besides being honored with memberships and posts to several prestigious organizations and institutions, Said was the recipient of twenty honorary degrees from universities around the world.^[130] Said was the recipient of Harvard University's Bowdoin Prize. He received the Lionel Trilling Award (twice), the first occasion being the first time the award was given. He also received the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and the inaugural Spinoza Lens Award.^[131] In 2001, Said received the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2002, he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, and he was the first U.S. citizen to receive the Sultan Owais prize.^[132] His autobiography, Out of Place, won him the 1999 New Yorker Book Award for Non-Fiction; the 2000 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction; and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature.^[133] Said Was named an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society, Trinity College, Dublin in 2003, shortly before his death.

Honorary Degree at The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS): Orientalism once more (2003) / Edward W. Said / The Hague: ISS, 2003. Lecture delivered on the occasion of the awarding of the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa on the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands, 21 May 2003.

See also[link]

Biography portal

• Blaming the Victims
• List of Columbia University people
• Palestinian Christians
• Projects working for peace among Arabs and Israelis

Notes[link]

1. ^ One critic, Justus Weiner,^[17] asserted that Said's formative years were spent in Egypt where his family's business was located, and that Said "probably" did not attend St. George's Academy in Jerusalem, except briefly. There is no official record of his attendance in the school registry books from the period. Weiner said that cast doubt on Said's qualification to contribute to the debate over the dispossession of Arabs before Israel's founding in 1948. Weiner said he did not interview Edward Said. Asked about this, he said that after conducting research that lasted three years, he saw no need to talk to Said about his memories or his childhood: "The evidence became so overwhelming. It was no longer an issue of discrepancies. It was a chasm. There was no point in calling him up and saying, 'You're a liar, you're a fraud.'" Three journalists and one historian wrote that Weiner's claims are false. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch interviewed Haig Boyadjian, who reported telling Weiner that he had been Said's classmate at St. George's, a fact Weiner omitted mentioning ^[18] In The Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's,^[19] and quoted Said stating, that in 1992, Said had spent much of his youth in Cairo.^[20] Amos Elon, biographer of the founders of Israel, wrote in The New York Review of Books that Weiner failed to disprove that, in the winter of 1947–48, Said "and his family sought refuge from the war outside Palestine, as did hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians at the time. The fact remains that shortly afterward the family's property in Jerusalem was confiscated. Said and his family became political refugees as the result of the Israeli government's refusal to allow them to return to the country of their birth."^[21] In reply, Weiner accused Elon of dishonesty, and Hitchens of making himself "into a poster boy for Palestine."^[22] Said observed that the publishers of Commentary, a conservative magazine, had attacked him in three long articles and that Weiner's was the third in the series.^[23][24] Said commented that the article about his early life was "undercut by dozens of mistakes of fact."^[25]
2. ^ Martin Kramer wrote that "Fifteen years after publication of Orientalism, the UCLA historian Nikki Keddie, whose work Said had praised in Covering Islam, allowed that Orientalism was 'important and in many ways positive.'^[65] But, in an interview, Keddie said that she also thought Said's work on Orientalism had had "unfortunate consequences." She continued:

   “

   I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word "orientalism" as a generalized swear-word essentially referring to people who take the "wrong" position on the Arab–Israeli dispute or to people who are judged too "conservative". It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So "orientalism" for many people is a word that substitutes for thought and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Said meant at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan.[66]

   ”

References[link]