CMPL 266 - Forgotten Orientalisms: Alternative Views of the East

FC ARHU CD WINT

4 credits
Since the publication of Edward Said’s controversial book Orientalism (1978), scholars focused their attention on problems of Orientalist literature and art produced within the contexts of British and French imperialism. Orientalists from other languages and empires have been either less remembered and analyzed or gone entirely forgotten. What about the German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and American orientalisms? Is orientalism one or many? We will read critiques of discourses on alterity and domination (literary and cultural criticism, historiography, anthropology, psychoanalysis, feminist critique) in order to explore the literary, cultural, cinematic, and artistic expressions of cultural encounters across Europe and the Middle East. We will pay attention to how writers and artists practice cultural translation, content with, resist, and at times participate in the problems of Orientalism. By the end of the semester, you will become familiar with the aesthetics and politics of less known orientalisms and will have mastered key interpretive tools to make important interventions in debates concerning postcolonial experience, immigration, diasporic, exile and refugee conditions that continue to define debates across Europe, U.S. and the Middle East region today.

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