Download or read book Europe s Myths of Orient written by Rana Kabbani and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In travel books and Orientalist painting, the Victorian concept of an erotic East as a grand harem with endless potential for pleasure and perversion fueled romantic imaginations, art, and commerce. These racial and sexual stereotypes became vital to imperial designs. In Imperial Fictions, Rana Kabbani unravels the erotic fantasies and myths that the West has developed about the East over the ages. Includes a new introduction about modern-day perceptions of the Islamic world.
Download or read book Imperial Fictions written by Rana Kabbani and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rana Kabbani unravels Western fantasies and myths about the East which were woven over the ages. Devised during the Crusades to combat Islam, then confirmed by centuries of Western writers and artists, these myths fostered racial and sexual stereotypes that became vital to imperial designs. In Orientalist travelogues and paintings, the British and the French conceived of an erotic and sinister East, one that they believed to be morally inferior and dangerous, and therefore ripe for colonisation. Such perceptions remain very much apparent today, fuelling the tension between East and West. "Imperial Fictions", now a classic, is an erudite analysis of Europe's fabricated Orient, as expressed in its writings and illustrated in its paintings.
Download or read book Europe s Myths of Orient written by Rana Kabbani and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Orientalism written by Edward W. Said and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.
Download or read book Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient written by Zeynep Çelik and published by . This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century before the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, a passionate discourse emerged in the Ottoman Empire, rebutting politicized Western representations of the East. Until the 1930s, Ottoman and early Turkish Republican intellectuals, well acquainted with the European political and cultural scene and charged with their own ideological agendas, deconstructed tired clichés about "the Orient." In this book, Zeynep Çelik recontextualizes Eurocentric postcolonial studies, unearthing an important episode in modern Middle Eastern intellectual history and curating a selection of primary texts illustrating the debates.
Download or read book Antinomies of Modernity written by Sucheta Mazumdar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-21 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA collection of essays arguing for a global and economically based modernity driven by capitalist development./div
Download or read book The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought written by John Block Friedman and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond the boundaries of the known Christian world during the Middle Ages, there were alien cultures that intrigued, puzzled, and sometimes frightened the people of Europe. The reports of travelers in Africa and Asia revealed that "monstrous" races of men lived there, whose appearance and customs were quite different from the European norm. This book examines the impact of these races upon Western art, literature, and philosophy, from their earliest mention until the age of exploration. Friedman furnishes a descriptive catalog of the races, most of which were real, geographically remote peoples, some of which were fabled creatures that served as symbols. He traces the evolution of European attitudes toward them, with particular emphasis on the high Middle Ages, when they seem most strongly to have captured the Western imagination. Ranging through literature, the arts, cartography, canon law, and theology, he considers the widely varying ways in which Christians viewed and depicted strange races of men. Finally, he examines transformations in European consciousness brought about by the discoveries of the exotic peoples of the Americas. Whatever their form—pygmy, giant, hirsute cave—dweller, cyclops, or Amazon-the monstrous races clearly challenged the traditional concept of man in the Christian world scheme. It is the medieval thinking about this challenge that Mr. Friedman addresses in this revealing account.
Download or read book Europe s Indians written by Vanita Seth and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe’s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self–other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth’s examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, Seth argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. Europe’s Indians shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body.
Download or read book The Myth of Continents written by Martin W. Lewis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-08-11 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a thoughtful and engaging critique, geographer Martin W. Lewis and historian Karen Wigen re-examine the basic geographical divisions we take for granted. Their up-to-the-minute study reflects both on the global scale and its relation to the specific continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa actually part of one contiguous landmass. Photos. maps.
Download or read book Compass written by Mathias Énard and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources—nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie—and binds them together in a most magical way.
Download or read book Russian Orientalism written by David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-20 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, the author examines Russian thinking about the Orient before the Revolution of 1917. He argues that the Russian Empire's bi-continental geography and the complicated nature of its encounter with Asia have all resulted in a variegated understanding of the East among its people.
Download or read book The Early Islamic Conquests written by Fred M. Donner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this contribution to the ongoing debate on the nature and causes of the Islamic conquests in Syria and Iraq during the sixth and seventh centuries, Fred Donner argues for a necessary distinction between the causes of the conquests, the causes of their success, and the causes of the subsequent Arab migrations to the Fertile Crescent. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Myths of Europe written by Richard Littlejohns and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Myths of Europe focuses on the identity of Europe, seeking to re-assess its cultural, literary and political traditions in the context of the 21st century. Over 20 authors - historians, political scientists, literary scholars, art and cultural historians - from five countries here enter into a debate. How far are the myths by which Europe has defined itself for centuries relevant to its role in global politics after 9/11? Can 'Old Europe' maintain its traditional identity now that the European Union includes countries previously supposed to be on its periphery? How has Europe handled relations with the non-European Other in the past and how is it reacting now to an influx of immigrants and asylum seekers? It becomes clear that founding myths such as Hamlet and St Nicholas have helped construct the European consciousness but also that these and other European myths have disturbing Eurocentric implications. Are these myths still viable today and, if so, to what extent and for what purpose? This volume sits on the interface between culture and politics and is important reading for all those interested in the transmission of myth and in both the past and the future of Europe.
Download or read book A Philosophy of Political Myth written by Chiara Bottici and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, originally published in 2007, Chiara Bottici argues for a philosophical understanding of political myth. Bottici demonstrates that myth is a process, one of continuous work on a basic narrative pattern that responds to a need for significance. Human beings need meaning in order to master the world they live in, but they also need significance in order to live in a world that is less indifferent to them. This is particularly true in the realm of politics. Political myths are narratives through which we orient ourselves, and act and feel about our political world. Bottici shows that in order to come to terms with contemporary phenomena, such as the clash between civilizations, we need a Copernican revolution in political philosophy. If we want to save reason, we need to look at it from the standpoint of myth.
Download or read book Inventing Europe written by G. Delanty and published by Springer. This book was released on 1995-04-19 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical analysis of the idea of Europe and the limits and possibilities of a European identity in the broader perspective of history. This book argues that the crucial issue is the articulation of a new identity that is based on post-national citizenship rather than ambivalent notions of unity.
Download or read book Aryans Jews Brahmins written by Dorothy M. Figueira and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system. In Europe, the Aryan myth provided certain thinkers with an origin story that could compete with the Biblical one and could be used to diminish the importance of the West's Jewish heritage. European racial hygienists made much of the myth of a pure Aryan race, and the Nazis later looked at India as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a nation did not remain "pure." As Figueira demonstrates, the history of the Aryan myth is also a history of reading, interpretation, and imaginative construction. Initially, the ideology of the Aryan was imposed upon absent or false texts. Over time, it involved strategies of constructing, evoking, or distorting the canon. Each construction of racial identity was concerned with key issues of reading: canonicity, textual accessibility, interpretive strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The book's cross-cultural investigation demonstrates how identities can be and are created from texts and illuminates an engrossing, often disturbing history that arose from these creations.
Download or read book Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy written by Joseph Luzzi and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study considers Italian Romanticism and the modern myth of Italy. Ranging across European and international borders, he examines the metaphors, facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the Romantic age and continue to haunt the global literary imagination.
