A young academic who teaches at a university in Marvdasht, a small provincial city in central Iran, knowing of my interest in the work of the Palestinian-American literary scholar and public intellectual Edward W. Said (1935-2003), recently contacted me by email. He is the organizer of a reading group made up of students of geography who were beginning to read Said’s Orientalism (1978) and wished to engage with scholars based outside Iran to gain other perspectives on the work. Would I, he asked, agree to an email correspondence, writing responses to their questions? I was delighted, but also surprised – a reading group of geography students in a rather remote town in central Iran discussing the works of Edward Said? To paraphrase the title of a popular recent work of non-fiction, I had no idea that Iranian students were reading Orientalism in Marvdasht.
Thirty years have passed since the publication of Orientalism, Edward Said’s most influential work. To understand its impact, we need only to reflect on the fact that the students of Marvdasht have joined a worldwide community of humanities students for whom this particular text is considered essential reading. Said’s study still plays an important role in diverse contexts on both sides of what has been termed the ‘divide’ between ‘East’ and ‘West’, and his critique of representational activity around the ‘Orient’ continues to generate debates in societies seen as falling on both sides of this divide.
In fact, Said’s oeuvre fundamentally aimed to challenge the validity of such a division, and so in one sense Orientalism is a study addressing the history of the emergence of this conceptual divide. It does so by chronicling the entanglement of the concept of an immutable or essential division between East and West with ideological imperatives from the perspective of what the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault called ‘the power/ knowledge axis’ – or, more simply, the relationship of knowledge to power. With power comes the need to generate a kind of knowledge that reinforces this power, and so the academic field of Orientalism (and other representations of the parts of the world known as the Orient) is implicated in the power relations between West and East. This, Said argued, began with the advent of colonialism and was carried over in the global geopolitical power arrangements after the end of colonialism – arrangements that have certainly changed in the last thirty years, but arguably only in ways that underscore the importance of Orientalism’s critique.
Just as the students in Marvdasht continue to grapple with Said’s writing in an effort to map out an understanding of their world, so readers in the UK and other parts of the world find a continuing relevance for the debates raised in Orientalism. It is true that in the weeks after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, certain commentators boldly proclaimed the end to the kind of critical approach represented by Said, but it now appears that, rather than be doomed to obsolescence, Orientalism is being revisited anew. Although Said’s critics have by no means retreated – as in, for example, the recent work by Robert Irwin, Lust for Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2007) – even the profusion of critiques of the work in recent years only serves to illustrate the continuing timeliness of the debates that were refracted within its prism.
As interest in issues relating to the Middle East and the Islamic faith expands both among the public and in the universities, it is unsurprising to find Orientalism being frequently cited and consulted. Indeed, with the Western countries involved in ongoing military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ever-inflamed wound that is the question of Palestine, and the dangerous prospects of a major conflagration over Iran’s nuclear programme, the issues debated around Orientalism may seem much less abstract than they did in 1978, when the book first appeared.
The thirtieth anniversary of its publication is a fitting moment for cultural institutions to revisit the debates raised by Orientalism. Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition ‘The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting’ does just that by bringing together some of the foremost British contributions in the field of visual arts to the European Orientalist imagination. The exhibition, a collaboration with the Yale Museum of British Art and Tate Britain, has been curated by Nicholas Tromans and Emily M. Weeks, who explicitly cite Said’s book as a touchstone. In a beautiful and very well-conceived exhibition catalogue they not only bring to the fore the complex aesthetic imperatives to the construction of a British Orientalist aesthetic within the field of the visual arts, but also attempt to revisit the ideological genealogies for the production of such works of art, linking these discussions directly to Orientalism. The catalogue includes a set of critical essays along with mesmerizing reproductions of the paintings and drawings that make up the core of the exhibition.
In his introductory essay, Nicholas Tromans links a range of social and material considerations to the aesthetic questions more often dwelt upon in curatorial work, insisting that it is necessary ‘to ask afresh the question of what the Orient had to offer the professional painter’. Tromans goes on to note that while Said’s Orientalism offers little by way of a direct contribution to art historical debates, the text nonetheless opens up a number of useful critical approaches to the study of the aesthetics of Orientalist painting. He questions the coincidence of the coalescence of Orientalist painting and the nineteenth-century Ottoman reformist tanzimat policies and suggests that the relationship of East and West – while largely defined by the demands of colonialism and imperialism – may be more interactive than sometimes understood in scholarship influenced by Said. His introduction ends by looking at instances where nineteenth-century Orientalist painting has been brought into contemporary contexts, for example citing the use of G. F. Watts’ painting ‘Hope’ ‘as an emblem of national perseverance’ by the Egyptian army after their defeat by Israel in 1967.
Co-curator Emily Weeks takes a more critical approach, arguing that ‘art history has been singularly reluctant to work through the faults of Said’s Orientalism and develop more nuanced lenses through which to view the Orientalist paintings that are, by an unfortunate coincidence of terminology, believed to reflect its tenets’. She presents an overview of the works of John Frederick Lewis, several of whose paintings are included in the exhibition, in order to raise questions about what she sees to be the reductive conclusions presented by Orientalism. However, at times this critique seems slightly misdirected – surely Said himself is not responsible for the widespread conflation of Orientalist painting with the academic discipline of Orientalism. While some scholars no doubt may have reductively applied the critiques in Orientalism to contexts deserving a more nuanced approach, any fair reader of Said’s scholarly corpus – including the related texts Culture and Imperialism and Humanism and Democratic Criticism – would not find that his own approach to cultural issues suffers from the kind of simplicity indicated by Weeks.
Further essays by Rana Kabbani, Fatema Mernissi and Christine Riding cover different aspects of the same general debate, whose central questions may be summarized as: How valid are the critiques of Orientalism for understanding visual representations of the ‘Orient’ carried out by British artists? What are the reasons for wishing to continue to revisit the period of high ‘Orientalism’ and its cultural dimensions? Do the works of Orientalist painters reflect the ways in which the Middle East, the Arab world and the Islamic world are perceived in the West?
The diversity of viewpoints on these and similar topics discussed in the exhibition catalogue go some way towards illuminating the extent to which the debates raised by Orientalism remain far from being settled. Said’s work, while subjected to a variety of cogent critiques over the years, has remained a vital marker of how we understand the relationship of ‘East’ to ‘West’. As this relationship continues to evolve, cultural institutions may play a very important role in exploring the interactions between the Middle East and Europe from a historical perspective. It is most valuable when these efforts link the past to current predicaments, as is the intention of the current exhibition.
In viewing anew these extraordinary works of art, we come to a better appreciation of the constellation of interests – material, aesthetic, ideological – that have come to frame the way in which the Orient, including the later permutations of this notion, has been imagined and represented in the West. It is a testament to Orientalism the book that even now, thirty years on, it continues to play a central role in outlining these debates. It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that in a small city in central Iran, university students are reading Said’s work in order to make better sense of their world.
Orientalism in Istanbul
The huge print of ‘Leila’ by Frank Dicksee which hangs, with prints of other nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings, in an Istanbul coffee house, reassures us that the girl dressed in brightly coloured silk and reclining languorously on a tiger skin does not offend Eastern sensibilities. (It also adorns the front cover of this magazine.) The Orientalist collection ‘Portraits from the Empire’ at the city’s Pera Museum (where the ‘Lure of the East’ exhbition will show after Tate Britain in London) suggests an acceptance of this fanciful Western view of a mysterious foreign world which few had ever seen.
Most British Orientalists painted their pictures back in England after a brief sketching tour around Turkey, Palestine or North Africa. They were often posed by models, sometimes even the artists themselves, in Ottoman dress purchased on the tour, and they showed Europeans the artificial, clichéed world they expected to encounter. In particular, paintings of the harem, an area forbidden to these male artists, presented a popular fantasy of sexual promiscuity.
This enduring fascination of the West with the East raises the question of how the East saw itself. The only Eastern artist in this exhibition is Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910), who was born and died in Constantinople, and as director of the Archaeological Museum there, was instrumental in preventing historical artefacts from being smuggled out of the country. He was heavily influenced by European Orientalism, having studied art for a number of years in Paris. So are his paintings different from those of European artists? Are they more authentic? Superficially they do not appear so, but they are less overtly erotic, showing a creative and elegant harem resonant with allegorical meanings. By contrast, photographs show him and his daughter in full Western dress. A pioneer in many fields, Hamdi Bey engaged with the modernisation of Turkey whilst portraying the Orientalist myth of a static world.
Thirty years have passed since the publication of Orientalism, Edward Said’s most influential work. To understand its impact, we need only to reflect on the fact that the students of Marvdasht have joined a worldwide community of humanities students for whom this particular text is considered essential reading. Said’s study still plays an important role in diverse contexts on both sides of what has been termed the ‘divide’ between ‘East’ and ‘West’, and his critique of representational activity around the ‘Orient’ continues to generate debates in societies seen as falling on both sides of this divide.
In fact, Said’s oeuvre fundamentally aimed to challenge the validity of such a division, and so in one sense Orientalism is a study addressing the history of the emergence of this conceptual divide. It does so by chronicling the entanglement of the concept of an immutable or essential division between East and West with ideological imperatives from the perspective of what the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault called ‘the power/ knowledge axis’ – or, more simply, the relationship of knowledge to power. With power comes the need to generate a kind of knowledge that reinforces this power, and so the academic field of Orientalism (and other representations of the parts of the world known as the Orient) is implicated in the power relations between West and East. This, Said argued, began with the advent of colonialism and was carried over in the global geopolitical power arrangements after the end of colonialism – arrangements that have certainly changed in the last thirty years, but arguably only in ways that underscore the importance of Orientalism’s critique.
Just as the students in Marvdasht continue to grapple with Said’s writing in an effort to map out an understanding of their world, so readers in the UK and other parts of the world find a continuing relevance for the debates raised in Orientalism. It is true that in the weeks after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, certain commentators boldly proclaimed the end to the kind of critical approach represented by Said, but it now appears that, rather than be doomed to obsolescence, Orientalism is being revisited anew. Although Said’s critics have by no means retreated – as in, for example, the recent work by Robert Irwin, Lust for Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2007) – even the profusion of critiques of the work in recent years only serves to illustrate the continuing timeliness of the debates that were refracted within its prism.
As interest in issues relating to the Middle East and the Islamic faith expands both among the public and in the universities, it is unsurprising to find Orientalism being frequently cited and consulted. Indeed, with the Western countries involved in ongoing military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ever-inflamed wound that is the question of Palestine, and the dangerous prospects of a major conflagration over Iran’s nuclear programme, the issues debated around Orientalism may seem much less abstract than they did in 1978, when the book first appeared.
The thirtieth anniversary of its publication is a fitting moment for cultural institutions to revisit the debates raised by Orientalism. Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition ‘The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting’ does just that by bringing together some of the foremost British contributions in the field of visual arts to the European Orientalist imagination. The exhibition, a collaboration with the Yale Museum of British Art and Tate Britain, has been curated by Nicholas Tromans and Emily M. Weeks, who explicitly cite Said’s book as a touchstone. In a beautiful and very well-conceived exhibition catalogue they not only bring to the fore the complex aesthetic imperatives to the construction of a British Orientalist aesthetic within the field of the visual arts, but also attempt to revisit the ideological genealogies for the production of such works of art, linking these discussions directly to Orientalism. The catalogue includes a set of critical essays along with mesmerizing reproductions of the paintings and drawings that make up the core of the exhibition.
In his introductory essay, Nicholas Tromans links a range of social and material considerations to the aesthetic questions more often dwelt upon in curatorial work, insisting that it is necessary ‘to ask afresh the question of what the Orient had to offer the professional painter’. Tromans goes on to note that while Said’s Orientalism offers little by way of a direct contribution to art historical debates, the text nonetheless opens up a number of useful critical approaches to the study of the aesthetics of Orientalist painting. He questions the coincidence of the coalescence of Orientalist painting and the nineteenth-century Ottoman reformist tanzimat policies and suggests that the relationship of East and West – while largely defined by the demands of colonialism and imperialism – may be more interactive than sometimes understood in scholarship influenced by Said. His introduction ends by looking at instances where nineteenth-century Orientalist painting has been brought into contemporary contexts, for example citing the use of G. F. Watts’ painting ‘Hope’ ‘as an emblem of national perseverance’ by the Egyptian army after their defeat by Israel in 1967. Co-curator Emily Weeks takes a more critical approach, arguing that ‘art history has been singularly reluctant to work through the faults of Said’s Orientalism and develop more nuanced lenses through which to view the Orientalist paintings that are, by an unfortunate coincidence of terminology, believed to reflect its tenets’. She presents an overview of the works of John Frederick Lewis, several of whose paintings are included in the exhibition, in order to raise questions about what she sees to be the reductive conclusions presented by Orientalism. However, at times this critique seems slightly misdirected – surely Said himself is not responsible for the widespread conflation of Orientalist painting with the academic discipline of Orientalism. While some scholars no doubt may have reductively applied the critiques in Orientalism to contexts deserving a more nuanced approach, any fair reader of Said’s scholarly corpus – including the related texts Culture and Imperialism and Humanism and Democratic Criticism – would not find that his own approach to cultural issues suffers from the kind of simplicity indicated by Weeks.
Further essays by Rana Kabbani, Fatema Mernissi and Christine Riding cover different aspects of the same general debate, whose central questions may be summarized as: How valid are the critiques of Orientalism for understanding visual representations of the ‘Orient’ carried out by British artists? What are the reasons for wishing to continue to revisit the period of high ‘Orientalism’ and its cultural dimensions? Do the works of Orientalist painters reflect the ways in which the Middle East, the Arab world and the Islamic world are perceived in the West?
The diversity of viewpoints on these and similar topics discussed in the exhibition catalogue go some way towards illuminating the extent to which the debates raised by Orientalism remain far from being settled. Said’s work, while subjected to a variety of cogent critiques over the years, has remained a vital marker of how we understand the relationship of ‘East’ to ‘West’. As this relationship continues to evolve, cultural institutions may play a very important role in exploring the interactions between the Middle East and Europe from a historical perspective. It is most valuable when these efforts link the past to current predicaments, as is the intention of the current exhibition.
In viewing anew these extraordinary works of art, we come to a better appreciation of the constellation of interests – material, aesthetic, ideological – that have come to frame the way in which the Orient, including the later permutations of this notion, has been imagined and represented in the West. It is a testament to Orientalism the book that even now, thirty years on, it continues to play a central role in outlining these debates. It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that in a small city in central Iran, university students are reading Said’s work in order to make better sense of their world.
- Kamran Rastegar is lecturer in Arabic and Persian at the University of Edinburgh.
Orientalism in Istanbul
The huge print of ‘Leila’ by Frank Dicksee which hangs, with prints of other nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings, in an Istanbul coffee house, reassures us that the girl dressed in brightly coloured silk and reclining languorously on a tiger skin does not offend Eastern sensibilities. (It also adorns the front cover of this magazine.) The Orientalist collection ‘Portraits from the Empire’ at the city’s Pera Museum (where the ‘Lure of the East’ exhbition will show after Tate Britain in London) suggests an acceptance of this fanciful Western view of a mysterious foreign world which few had ever seen.
Most British Orientalists painted their pictures back in England after a brief sketching tour around Turkey, Palestine or North Africa. They were often posed by models, sometimes even the artists themselves, in Ottoman dress purchased on the tour, and they showed Europeans the artificial, clichéed world they expected to encounter. In particular, paintings of the harem, an area forbidden to these male artists, presented a popular fantasy of sexual promiscuity.
This enduring fascination of the West with the East raises the question of how the East saw itself. The only Eastern artist in this exhibition is Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910), who was born and died in Constantinople, and as director of the Archaeological Museum there, was instrumental in preventing historical artefacts from being smuggled out of the country. He was heavily influenced by European Orientalism, having studied art for a number of years in Paris. So are his paintings different from those of European artists? Are they more authentic? Superficially they do not appear so, but they are less overtly erotic, showing a creative and elegant harem resonant with allegorical meanings. By contrast, photographs show him and his daughter in full Western dress. A pioneer in many fields, Hamdi Bey engaged with the modernisation of Turkey whilst portraying the Orientalist myth of a static world.
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