141046 SE Current discussions in the Arab world: Orientalism in the past and present (2024W)

Analyzing multiple meanings and connotations attributed to “Orientalism,” this course will survey nuanced socio-anthropological, historical, historiographical, political, epistemological and hermeneutical implications the term has accrued and conveyed with the passage of time. Despite recent academic efforts to heavily revise the disciplinary approaches and methods tied to the concept, Orientalism thrived both in the Arabic-speaking regions and other parts of the world for several centuries. The class will discuss the reasons for its (re-)emergence and continuity, both historically, and in the present, taking note of the varying directions the discipline undertook during its development in the US, UK, France, Central Europe, as well as further to the east.
Focus will primarily be placed on prolific writing of orientalists after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798). However, the class will also concentrate on the implications of orientalists’ work for state of affairs around the globe today, discussing social, anthropological, and geopolitical interactions carried out through continuous invocation of orientalist tropes and the construction of an “oriental other.” Participants are expected to complete the course with a broadened awareness of a vast and divergent pool of orientalist material, familiar with ways in which oriental identities were manufactured in older and more recent literature, to serve either as pejorative interpretations of people who lived in European Arabic-speaking colonies (and broader), or as objects of fascination due to common interpretations of their traits as peculiar, exotic, and inherently different. The course will take note of the fact that oriental literature did not fully represent a product of western colonial powers, nor of other foreigners to Arabic-speaking regions. Some sessions will therefore offer readings into how Ottoman, Turkish, and Arab intellectuals discussed their own environment, frequently contributing to the growing orientalist discourse.