HIST 498(Orientalism and Its Critics)
Spring 2015
219 Gregory Hall, 10:00-11:50 AM
Prof. Behrooz Ghamari
bghamari@illinois.edu
406 Gregory Hall
Office Hours:
T-TR 1:00-2:00
DESCRIPTION
How do we study the history and culture of a people unknown to ourselves
without projecting our own values and views upon them? The goal of this class
is to problematize the possibility and the means through which westerners have
depicted and imagined non-westerners, thus the term “orientalism.” Orientalism
comprises a wide range of historical, social, literary, and popular writings as well
as other forms of artistic production (painting, photography, films) that sought to
uncover the essential features of non-Western civilizations, particularly in the
Middle East and the continent of Asia. In its textual form, Orientalism was based
on the study of original texts, which were assumed to be representative of the
essence of these civilizations. Exoticizing the Orient through visual
(pornographic) depiction was another aspect of Orientalism. Although we can
trace the fascination with the Orient to ancient times, this class will focus
primarily on the historical period of the expansion of modern Europe since the
time of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Linking Orientalism to the
project of the Enlightenment serves historical and epistemological purposes. The
historical and epistemological significance of Orientalism lies on the one hand in
its particular way of dealing with the alien and construction of "the other", and
on the other hand, in its institutional relation with European colonialism and
imperialism.
The main objective of this class is to use primary documents available in the
library in order to develop a map of Orientalist perceptions. There are a number
of issues that we need to deal with in the class. First and foremost, what does
count as primary document? For the purpose of this class, I have divided these
documents into three different categories, textual documents, photographic images,
and the arts. The main focus of our class will be on the textual documents. These
include: travelogues, administrative reports from the colonies, missionary
accounts, and other possible depictions and representations of people from the
Middle East, South Asia, East Asia and possibly Africa.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND EVALUATION
Required Readings:
Available for purchase at the university bookstore:
Edward Said, Orientalism, Vintage, 1978.
Alexander Lyon Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader, NYU Press, 2001.
Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and
Politics of Orientalism, Cambridge University Press, 2nd Edition 2010.
Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, Ottoman Harem,
Rutgers University Press, 2004.
For additional reading materials, check the class Compass page.
Attendance & Participation in class discussion is required. More than FOUR
unjustified absences from class will result in a failing grade. You will lose 1% of
your final grade for each unjustified absence. This is a discussion class, so I
will not be giving any lectures and you are responsible for reporting your
research activities in class. We shall try to link the reading material to your
research.
We will divide the class into four teams of two or three. Each team will conduct
its own research on 3 different genres of primary documents. For each topic, the
group has to create a power point presentation in class. Each member of the
group needs to write an individual two-page text that explains what their
primary document is and how one can read it through a critique of Orientalism.
(I will explain how to do this in class). I will upload the presentation onto the
Compass page. At the end of the class, pending on technical logistics, we will
create a web site on Orientalism.
Midterm Take-Home Exam: March 17. The midterm is going to be an exam
based on the literature we cover in class in short essay format.
Final Paper: Due May 12. We’ll discuss the project later in class.
Plagiarism: (Please Read Carefully) We have a zero tolerance of plagiarism. Not
knowing what constitutes plagiarism cannot be used as an excuse for violating
the trust between a professor and a student. We define plagiarism as
representing the words or ideas of another as one’s own. Submitting papers not
written by the student is only the most blatant form of plagiarism. Plagiarism
also includes, but is not limited to: copying another student’s work in exams,
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papers, or other exercises; inappropriate collaboration with another student; and
verbatim copying, close paraphrasing, pasting in, or recombining published
materials, including materials from the internet, without appropriate citation.
For further consultation see:
http://www.history.illinois.edu/courses/plagiarism/
Grading and Evaluation:
Participation in class
3 research projects and presentation
Take-home exam (March 10-17)
Final Paper
Total
50X3
Points
100
150
100
150
500
Percentage
20%
30%
20%
30%
100%
CLASS SCHEDULE
Week 1 (Jan 20)
Welcoming chat and discussion about the goals and objectives of the class. This
week, I would offer a lecture on general issues of Orientalism and the problems
of Orientalist historiography.
Watch in class The Sheik, silent movie based on a popular 1919 novel by
Edith Hull. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBj1lpAAclI
Week 2 (Jan 27)
In this week’s reading, we will explore some of the ways in which Christians
living in the region that we think of today as Western Europe during the
medieval period came to perceive Islam, the new faith that emerged in the
Arabian Peninsula in the third decade of the seventh century. As we will see,
even the initial Western Christian perceptions of Islam and of its adherents did
not come out of nowhere or develop in a vacuum. Some of these concepts and
categories, and the images they generated, would prove quite durable over much
of the medieval period, though by the end of this period a handful of scholars
had begun to lay the basis for a somewhat better understanding of Islam.
In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the sense that Islam posed an
imminent military and ideological thereat receded. The Latin Christians thought
that the Mongols had been sent by God to destroy Islam once and for all. They
made a number of attempts to form alliances with them, but failed. This week
we shall read about the emergence of a more sustained boundary between
Europe and the land of Islam, focusing particularly on how these boundaries
were reflected in the way European Christians understood their Oriental
neighbors.
Reading:
Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of he Middle East, Chapters 1 and 2,
pp. 8-65.
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Week 3 (Feb 3)
Great post-Enlightenment philosophers and historians often viewed the Orient
as a place without history. This week we shall read short excerpts from J. S. Mill,
Hegel, and Marx. Here we need to keep in mind, that despite their political
differences, these philosophers shared similar views about oriental civilizations.
We will also look at the rise of Orientalism as a scholarly discipline.
Readings:
(All in A. L. Macfie’s Orientalism Reader, NYU Press, 2000)
James Mill: “The Indian for of Government,” pp. 11-12.
G. W. F. Hegel: “Gorgeous Edifices,” pp. 13-15
Karl Marx: “The British Rule in India,” pp. 16-19
Pierre Martino: “Les Commencements de l’orientalisme,” 21-30
Raymond Schwab: “The Asiatic Society of Calcutta,” 31-35.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans would
increasingly come to see the Orient as divided into two distinct units: a “Near
East” comprising southeastern Europe, the Levant (the land s along the eastern
shores of the Mediterranean and their hinterland), and other parts of western
Asia nearer to Europe, and a “far East” encompassing India, southeast Asia,
China, and Japan. By the later part of the nineteenth century, in popular usage in
the United States, the term “Oriental” had come to refer largely to people from
East Asia. Nonetheless, the Orient remained a powerful category in nineteenth
century European popular as well as scholarly culture.
Readings:
Zachary Lockman, “Orientalism and Empire,” chapter 3 in Contending
Visions, pp. 66-98.
From Orientalism Reader:
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Appearance and the Thing-in-Itself,” pp. 37-39.
Antonio Gramsci, “On Hegemony and Direct Rule,” pp. 39-41.
Michel Foucault: “Truth and Power,” pp. 41-46.
Week 4 (Feb 10) Arrange to meet the librarian
In this week’s readings, we learn how Orientalist thought informed dominant
political ideas in the West and conditioned the ideological frames of the
twentieth century world order. We also read about how social and political
changes around the world raised questions about Orientalist presuppositions.
Readings:
Zachary Lockman, Condenting Visions: “The American Century,” and
“Turmoil in the Field,” pp. 100-182.
Readings:
From Macfie’s Orientalism Reader:
Anouar Abdel-Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” pp. 47-56.
L. Tibawi, “ English-Speaking Orientalists,” pp. 57-76.
Bryan Turner, “Marx and the End of Orientalism,” pp. 117-119.
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Week 5 (Feb. 17)
This week will devote our attention to the writings of the most influential critic
of Orientalism, Edward Said. Edward Said's book, Orientalism, is the first time
that all three dimensions of Orientalism––a mode of thought, an academic
discipline, and a corporate institution––come together as a multi-layered
dominating discourse. Said separated himself from other critics by arguing that
the goal of his analysis was not to define a real Orient against its ideological
representation by Orientalist scholarship. Rather, he wanted to critique the very
practice of representation and to construct Orientalism as an apparatus of
power/knowledge. Said’s critique is not concerned with correspondence
between Orientalism and the Orient, rather it is focused on the internal
consistency of Orientalist ideas about the Orient. This internal consistency, Said
contended, is marked by the belief in an epistemological and ontological
distinction between the West and the Orient.
Readings: From Edward Said’s Orientalism, Vintage Books, 1979.
“Knowing the Oriental,” pp. 31-49.
“Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the
Oriental,” pp. 49-73.
“Projects,” pp. 73-92.
“Crisis,” pp. 92-110.
Week 6 (Feb 24)
Edward Said’s Orientalism made a considerable impression on the academic
world. In the period immediately following its publication, at least sixty reviews
and review articles appeared in Britain and America. This week, we shall read a
number of these reviews. Some critics expanded Said’s ideas, and some
chastised the book for failing to see notable distinctions between Orientalist
writings of different periods and different places.
Readings: From Macfie’s Orientalism Reader:
Stuart Schaar, “Orientalism at the Service of Imperialism,” pp. 181-193.
David Kopf, “Hermeneutics versus History,” pp. 194-207.
Michael Richardson, “Enough Said,” pp. 208-216.
Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm: “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” pp. 217238.
Ernest J. Wilson III, “Orientalism: A Black Perspective,” pp. 239-248.
Bernard Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism,” pp. 249-270.
Reading: from Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions:
“Said’s Orientalism: A Book and Its Aftermath,” pp. 183-215.
Week 7 & Week 8 (March 3 & March 10) (CLASS PRESENTATIONS)
At this point you are ready to do some research based on primary documents in
the library. We will devote these two weeks to your class presentations.
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Weeks 9-10 (March 17-March 31)
We should not imagine “Orientals” merely as objects to be represented by
westerners. Not only was Orientalism criticized for it a-historical and essentialist
depiction of non-western subjects, but also its representations were incessantly
challenged from within the non-western world. As we have already learned,
Orientalism is a deeply gendered view of the world, where nature/orient/
women are transformed into objects of exploitation and dominance by
western/masculine/rational actors. For the next two weeks, we shall read three
chapters from Reina Lewis’s book and see how she questions the prevailing
stereotypes of the subjugated, silenced woman of the harem.
Readings:
From Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, ad the
Ottoman Harem, Rutgers University Press: 2004.
Chapter 2, “Empire, Nation, and Culture,” pp. 53-95.
Chapter 3, “Harem: The Limits of Emancipation,” pp. 96-141.
Chapter 6, “Dress Acts: The Shifting Significance of Clothes,” pp. 206-250.
Week 11 (April 7) (3rd CLASS PRESENTATION)
Third presentation with a focus on gendered representations and counterrepresentations.
Week 12 (April 14)
We shall end our reading with a look at the political consequences of orientalist
thinking in the contemporary world. We shall scrutinize how this academic
discipline influences policy decisions at the highest echelons of the American
government, particularly at a time when “Islam” and the “Middle East” have
emerged as the main predicament of American foreign policy.
Readings:
Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions, chapter 7, “After Orientalim,” pp.
215-267.
Week 13 (April 21)
Watching the silent movie The Sheik once more to see how much our
understanding of the narrative and representations have changed
Week 14-15 (April 28-May 5)
Presentations of the final project and concluding remarks.
Final paper due May 12, before 5 PM
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