Cultural Orientalism mixed reverence with denigration and shifted across moments

Evidence

When studied within culture and the arts, Orientalism is not monolithic, as various scholars have argued. In her analysis of British and French writing from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, American studies scholar Lisa Lowe shows that not only are there differences between the two imperial nation’s literary works but that the “other” is represented differently at different moments. Historian John MacKenzie argues that culture is extraordinarily heterogeneous and, like Makdisi, notes that internal others played a role in the construction of external others. Furthermore, various artistic forms relied on cultural borrowing. Writers like Goethe drew from Persian and Arabic literary styles and European architects similarly were influenced by ancient Egyptian aesthetics. MacKenzie argues therefore that Orientalism is a constantly changing, versatile and protean form which is “as often consumed by admiration and reverence as by denigration and deprecation.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 179

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

Related

• Cultural Orientalism was admiring and varied, unlike institutional Orientalism that served colonialism. (similarity 0.92)
• Orientalist scholarship was internally diverse and historically contingent, not monolithic (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism is a discourse, not a mirror of imperial political power (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism’s essentialism hides both historical change and the Orientalist’s interests (similarity 0.82)
• Some nineteenth-century writers engaged the Orient aesthetically without reducing it to documentary knowledge (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist works are best read as authorial detail within an imperial discursive space (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism is chiefly a British and French enterprise, later American. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist cultural borrowing mixed admiration with denigration, not pure contempt (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist discourse was addressed exclusively to Western audiences, never to Orientals (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism must be examined at both the general and the individual level (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism’s denigration of its subject creates an inner contradiction for scholars who study it (similarity 0.80)
• Early Orientalism studied classical texts, not living societies (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism is a differentiated analysis, not a blanket attack on the West (similarity 0.80)