Academic Orientalism and Orientalist art were separate rather than one discourse
Evidence
The products of mainstream Orientalism were less colourful and less fluent than that. Orientalism in its most important aspect was founded upon academic drudgery and close attention to philological detail. I do not believe that the novelist Flaubert and the Arabist and Islamicist Sir Hamilton Gibb were really contributing to essentially the same discourse or were the victims of it. However, the distinction between academic and artistic production is, of course, not hard-edged. For example, William Beckford’s novel Vathek has academic-looking footnotes and, on the other hand, Gibb’s understanding of Saladin’s career was greatly influenced by his enthusiasm for Walter Scott’s novel The Talisman. There is a significant overlap between Orientalist scholarship and artistic works of an Oriental inspiration, but it is, I believe, only an overlap and not evidence of a single cohesive discourse. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 26
Categorization
- XREF: Directly contradicts Said’s core thesis in Orientalism that scholarly and artistic Orientalism formed one cohesive discourse.
- ADDENDUM: Relevant scaffolding for the Grafting and Growth essay’s stance that prestige art and working craft belong to separate registers.
Related
- Orientalism’s claim to scholarly attention rests on its uniqueness among fields (similarity 0.80)
- Some nineteenth-century writers engaged the Orient aesthetically without reducing it to documentary knowledge (similarity 0.79)
- The real Orient rarely guided European artistic visions of it (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalist works are best read as authorial detail within an imperial discursive space (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalism must be examined at both the general and the individual level (similarity 0.79)
- Scholarly Orientalism telescoped textual detail into policy about the whole Orient (similarity 0.78)
- Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.78)