Orientalism

Orientalism
by Tabarzin
24-Aug-2011
 

//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism

Edward Sa'id speaks about Orientalism.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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more from Tabarzin
 
anglophile

Since you asked me like a gentleman Mash Ghasem

by anglophile on Thu Aug 25, 2011 05:23 AM PDT

I changed my avatar to a friendly face whom I admire.

:)


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Mash Ghasem

On the Non-Ambivalent side (within the Italian narrative)

by Mash Ghasem on Thu Aug 25, 2011 02:16 AM PDT

Tinto Brass + Monica Bellucci = Spot Infiore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN4KwcNF50Y&featur...

Me loves that movie, it's a great film.


  •  
Tiger Lily

LOL@calzone

by Tiger Lily on Thu Aug 25, 2011 01:55 AM PDT

 nothing to do with your ambi-cosmos

{al}one day I'll explain it to you.

 


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Mash Ghasem

TL: Is that Cosmopolitan Location or Ambivalence? and how about

by Mash Ghasem on Thu Aug 25, 2011 01:45 AM PDT

Calzone? Or we could posit the query as: What about Calzone?


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Tiger Lily

pizza

by Tiger Lily on Thu Aug 25, 2011 01:38 AM PDT

Occasionally, I find all this image, identity and location quite interesting. 

Particularly, how e.g. those who have had a particular image imposed on them, impress it further themselves. If you look at some of the images in Iran, they are perpetuated and diaspora has a tendency to go to another form of extreme.

Or the trail of a pizza: Pizza immigrates to the US and then goes to Napoli to be delivered by Domino as the "authentic Italian pizza"....  And an immigrant puts an optional doner on top. lol

 

 


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Mash Ghasem

Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Cosmopolitan Location in

by Mash Ghasem on Wed Aug 24, 2011 11:39 PM PDT

the Work of Edward Said. By: Aijaz Ahamd

//www.jstor.org/pss/4398691


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Mash Ghasem

I really enjoyed the exchange between you and anglophile, wish

by Mash Ghasem on Thu Aug 25, 2011 12:38 AM PDT

more blog had as much substance in their texts and exchanges as the one here, thank you both.

Sorry to disappoint you on Fanon, but it'll be a while before I'll get to Fanon. I had planned to have a blog on Lorca (August is the month of his excution),  and another one on the new poet laureate of the US, Phillip Levine (this guy is just amazing), and then you gave me the idea on Fanon, while we were on DK's blog. I still haven't caught up with Lorca yet.

How about a joint blog, or a group blog, on Lorca to get things moving?

What do you think about Jalal al-Azm?

I'll try to find Aejaz Ahamds' critique of  Said's Orientalism as well. To my limited knoweledge these two: Ahmad and Jalal al-Azm are two of the best critiques of that very important book, cheers

P.S. Homa Nategh also had an essay on  de Gobineau's observations on Iran. Published in Saedi's Alefba. I'll try to dig that up as well.

P.S.S. Dear anglophile could you please change your avatar to something a bit friendlier, less offensive, from the great English culture: Blake, Charlie Chaplin, Beckham,...?

 


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anglophile

Thanks again Tabarzin

by anglophile on Wed Aug 24, 2011 02:06 PM PDT

You confirmed what I had suspected all the time about these three Frenchmen (sorry for spelling their names wrongly).

 

Spot on old chap :) 


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Tabarzin

Sure

by Tabarzin on Wed Aug 24, 2011 01:46 PM PDT

Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was a racist and typifies what Sa'id is talking about. Louis Massignon was a great scholar and a great activist, and although Sa'id has his beef with Massignon, Massignon was no Orientalist. Corbin was an honorary Iranian as far as I am concerned and an Orientalist (mashriqi) in the non-Sa'idian unpejorative definition of the term.


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anglophile

Thank you Tabarzi. Now may I ask your opinion on:

by anglophile on Wed Aug 24, 2011 01:37 PM PDT

the french school of Orientalists: Gobino, Massinon and Corban. were they Sa'idesque orientalists?

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Tabarzin

Mash_Ghasem

by Tabarzin on Wed Aug 24, 2011 12:50 PM PDT

I sure hope you put up that blog on Fanon.

 


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Tabarzin

Occidentalism

by Tabarzin on Wed Aug 24, 2011 12:45 PM PDT

//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occidentalism

//books.google.co.uk/books?id=FYvuDj4_GtUC&dq=occidentalism&hl=en&ei=xVNVTsreLcWIhQfwkZz6BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA

"A pioneering investigation of the lineage of anti-Western stereotypes
that traces them back to the West itself. Twenty-five years ago, Edward
Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the
denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial
mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian
Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the
minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and
woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking
investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the
Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others. We
generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but
Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam
certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the
West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary
anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that
the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who
has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back
to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of
the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again:
the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the
rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off
from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western
mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the
center by a cabal of insiders-often Jews-pulling the hidden levers of
power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and
soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic
world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does
that make it an exclusively Islamic matter. A work of extraordinary
range and erudition, Occidentalismwill permanently enlarge our
collective frame of vision."

//books.google.co.uk/books?id=OTNpPwAACAAJ&dq=occidentalism&hl=en&ei=xVNVTsreLcWIhQfwkZz6BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEsQ6AEwBg

"Occidentalism is a groundbreaking investigation into the hostile
stereotypes of the Western world that fuel the hatred at the heart of
movements such as Al Qaeda. A work of extraordinary range and erudition,
it will permanently enlarge our understanding of the world in which we
live."

See also this book article. 


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Tabarzin

anglophile

by Tabarzin on Wed Aug 24, 2011 12:29 PM PDT

I like Edward G. Browne and Richard N. Frye alot and have personally benefitted from their scholarship tremendously (esp. Browne's). But Sa'id is correct in that the assumptions  made in some  scholarship is laced by Orientalist discourse. Having said that, Browne is more difficult to locate into a neat Orientalist box than many of the other 19th century European scholars Sa'id talks about in the book. The typology would not apply to Frye because his scholarship is mainly on ancient Iranian history and not dealing with the Islamic period, whether premodern or modern. But 19th century French scholars like Baron Silvestre de'Sacy or the Austro-Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher can definitely be called Orientalists as per Sa'id's definition.

 


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anglophile

Oriental ism theory is inapplicable to Iranologists

by anglophile on Wed Aug 24, 2011 11:22 AM PDT

Iranologists such as Professor Richards Fry or his teacher Arthur Pope and others like Edward Browne do not fall into the mould of Orienltalism as defined by Edward Sa'id. These scholars were genuinely in love with Persia and had no intnetion of being colonialist. Sorry professor Sa'id but your definition of Orientalists and Orientalism is not all-inclusive.

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Mash Ghasem

Orientalism In Reverse

by Mash Ghasem on Wed Aug 24, 2011 10:59 AM PDT

Sadiq Jalal al-Azm

//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadiq_Jalal_al-Azm

he has contributed to the discourse of Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse. "Orientalism"[1]

 

//books.google.com/books?id=izpNLWUxp5IC&pg=P...


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