Hassan Al-Kalo
Student No. 201209804
Module No. 14124
Oriental Eyes in Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures: A study of the Landscape This essay is an attempt to investigate how the Eastern landscape has been othered by the West through inspecting Gertrude Bell’s travel book Persian Pictures (1894). The essay adopts Edwa rd Said’s concept of Orientalism to highlight the western ideology of othering the foreign landscape. The crux of ‘Orientalism’, being the vehicle of studying the colonial conflicts and the cultural hegemony, demarcates the European’s map road of dealing with the Other. It is one-sided ideology that reflects the Westerners’ views of the Orient as they have imagined it to be. I aim in this essay to scrutinise Bells’ narration of using the male voice in tackling the landscape in the texts under investigation. The abundant reports, literary narratives, and the variety of representations of the early travellers, present the Orient as strange, eccentric, savage, hostile, irrational, exotic, and mysterious, that has unresolved secrets, alien creatures, sensational women, monstrous and beast-like people. Said claims that it is sufficient for ‘us’ [Orientalists] to ‘set up these boundaries in our minds’, and ‘both the Other’s territory and their mentality’ have been ‘designated as different from “ours”’ (Said, 2003: 54). The essence of Orientalism in its true form, is to define the non-European and his landscape as the Other. This process could only be
The reader gets a rare and exotic understanding of a totally foreign and ancient culture experiencing the growing pains of colonial expansion during the British domination
Although Said didn’t directly look into gender orientalism he had made a great point in his article when discussing how the West view woman in an Oriental society. “[…] she never spoke of herself, and she never represented her emotions, presence or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male […]” (Said, Page 6). In this part Said is discussing how Western men would
This examination of intercultural relations is best begun with the interactions between the European explorers and colonists and the native inhabitants of the New World. From the first footfalls of Columbus in 1492 to the present day, the native inhabitants have been “…a familiar but little known—and, indeed, often an unreal-person to the non-Indian.”(Josephy, Jr., 1973) In fact the term Indian stems from Columbus’ own error in believing that he had reached the Indies off the coast of Asia. He termed the inhabitants he found “los Indios”, and subsequent explorers and chroniclers continued the misuse of the term. In and of itself this mistake in not monumental, however the resulting patterns of interactions and lack of viewing the native inhabitants as unique and socially diverse groups defined the reference set for European based culture for the next 400 plus years.
Similarly, Said’s description of Orientalism is also an example of modernity, in that he describes it as an “imaginative examination [based] exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness […] governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projects”. Thus, in Tracey Deer’s Mohawk Girls technologies of modernity can be seen through the creation and subsequent isolation of many First Nations to reserves, and the classification and declaration of “Indian-ness” or “Mohawk purity”.
“In all his travels the Bishop had seen no country like this. From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas... The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush,-- that oliver-coloured plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like marigolds.” 94 Both women describe the land of desert with such vividness that one is not left with the idea of a barren, sandy soil but an environment that is rich with history as well as life. This life and history of the land are a part of the culture.
The European’s mindset by the latter of the third of the 18th century saw that inside each Asian burned the effervescent ember of savagery. Without controlling governance over the people, Europeans believed anarchy would chaotically erupt in Asia. It was believed Asians truly did not have self-control without a supreme leader. Oriental despotism is the idea that the societies in Asia have a single totalitarian-formed government and without this leadership there would be no order to their society. According to Montesquieu, Asian power is absolutist and held in the hands of one. Everything that could possibly happen is in the merciless hands of the despotism. In Montesquieu’s epistolary novel The Persian Letters, he argues for oriental despotism through his two main characters in the story Usbec and Rico. He talks about the economic, political, social and cultural aspects of Persian society that he parallels with oriental despotism. Montesquieu also shows makes his story of the characters into a metaphor of the destruction of oriental despotism. Marx believed in the superiority of the west and the lack of growth in political and economic realms of Asiatic society contributing to the concept of Asian despotism. Finally, Hegel touches on the white man’s burden where he uses oriental despotism to explain the child like relationship Europeans had with the savage orients.
They tell a kind of Indian folklore which is not of India, but constructed by Kipling himself. This is not to suggest that what The Jungle Book depicts is a work of complete imagination; ‘essentially an idea’ with no corresponding reality, but rather that there are ‘regular constellations of ideas which become the pre-eminent thing about the Orient’. The Orient is conceptualised by strict and rigid lines of thinking which can never do justice to the ‘lives, histories and customs’ of the ‘cultures and nations whose location is in the East’. It is the pre-supposed authority of what ‘is said about them (the Orient) in the West’ which establishes the relationship between the Occident and the Orient as one of ‘power, of domination, of varying degrees of cultural hegemony.’5
They go beyond the traditional “negative stereotypes” so typical of the time period, for they recognize that the individuals in their stories cannot be reduced to pawns in a political conflict. The Arab and the Jew in both A Trumpet in the Wadi and Dancing Arabs are depicted as whole people with equally deep, human emotions. This clearly sets their works into a different category than that of their predecessors—for example, Amos Oz’s Nomad and Viper, also considered to be groundbreaking when it was published, still offers an image of the Arab as animalistic rather than humanistic. Indeed, in Nomad and Viper, the Arab, who is described as shadow-like, is much more a mirror of the Jew’s tormented psyche than an actual person: “The nomad stopped behind Geula’s back, as silent as a phantom […] His obedient shadow moved in the dust.” Not only does this create an image of the Arab as non-human, but it also represents him in a negative, menacing light. While the Jew is attracted to him in a repulsive sense, she experiences more of a passionate urge than any kind of true, deep emotion like what the reader sees in A Trumpet in the Wadi and Dancing Arabs. The Arab, or the “other,” in this instance is seem as dangerous—it is that which draws the Jew in more than anything. Passion of this sort is in fact a relatively uncomplicated emotion; it is fleeting, unlike love.
The well-protected Domains ‘’Ideology and the Legitimating of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876-1909’’ (I.B.Tauris, and pg.:5, 169). He was drawing upon Orientalism and it’s techniques of showing, he conjured upon in his paintings a domesticated vision of the Orient; an Eastern fantasy space they appealed to the exoticism sensibility of European audiences, and was also heavily informed by late Ottoman agenda son self-identification and projection. The Eastern-world is a real place in Osman Hamdi Bey’s paintings. He painted the topics elaborately, after detailed observations and using the documents.
The old saying “The sun never sets on the British empire” is a phrase usually associated to reference the vast swaths of land the English nation acquired through colonial expansion during the 19th and early 20th centuries. With this in mind, writers during the Late Victorian Gothic period use English imperial control in places such as India to project perceived English racial superiority, dominance, and prestige. For instance, in Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 work “The Mark of the Beast”, the primitive nature of Indian culture is used to make a broader commentary on the advancement of western society. In order to understand why British authors continually conquer their imperial counterparts through their writings, sir Henry Frere’s 1882 Anthropology
A culture’s literary and historical fiction remains as one of the most accurate sources (next to direct primary sources, of course) for gaining a unique perspective on a region’s history. The Ottoman Empire stands as a culture that few Americans care to experience or study, perhaps because they feel threatened by the idea of learning from the ancient pas of a people they consider “enemies” or “inferior.” Ivo Andric, however, provides a beautifully woven together history of the very culture few westerners study. The Bridge on the Drina provides a unique insight to culture, geography, and human experience through excellent and descriptive storytelling.
In his Introduction to Orientalism, Edward Said asserts that the “Orient has helped to define Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience,” (71). Therefore, in Season of Migration to the
In comparing Zora Neale Hurston’s “Of Mules and Men” and Clifford Geertz’s “Balinese Cockfight” a direct difference between insider verses outsider is portrayed. Hurston’s approach of going back and immersing herself into the culture she grew up in and Geertz’s approach of immersing himself into a foreign culture results in a clear distinction in their ethnographic approach, focus of observation and consequently their findings.
The proprietor of Yoshiwara used to earn money in a variety of ways. One of them, and quite positively the most harmless, was to make bets that no man, be he ever so widely travelled, was capable of guessing to what weird mixture of races he owed his face. So far, he had won all such bets, and would sweep in the money with hands of such cruel beauty they would not have shamed an ancestor of the Spanish Borgias, the nails of which showed an inobliterable shimmer of blue. On the other hand, the politeness of his smile on such profitable occasions originated unmistakably in that graceful insular world, which, from the eastern border of Asia, smiles gently and watchfully across the sea at mighty America.
Postcolonialism deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies. As originally used by historians after the Second World War in terms such as the post-colonial state, ‘post-colonial’ had a clearly chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period. However, from the late 1970s the term has been used by literary critics to discuss the various cultural effects of colonization. The term has been widely used to signfy the political, linguistic and cultural experience of societies that were former European colonies. In the present age we can say without any shadow of doubt that post colonialism has been primarily concerned to examine the processes and effects