EUROPE AND THE ORIENT (original) (raw)
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Discuss the role of 'the Orient' in European Imagination
This essay will attempt to analyse the work of Edward Said's imagined geographies in order to establish how the Orient came to be the Other in European imagination. The essay will then look at the use of discourse in imperialism and how this established a knowledge power relationship, drawing on the works of Michael Foucault. The essay will finally draw it attention to the representation of the Orient within European cinema and how the sexualisation and gendering of the Orient occurred and the results that have echoed through time.
The Orient" in Global Cultural Flow : the case of Turkish Riviera
2013
Europe is a complex space, a space always morphing and never static; a space of constant change of ethnic, national, cultural and political realities. The newly forming socio-cultural order in Europe is founded on the experience associated with movement, relocation and dislocation, and the personal experience of the physical, cognitive, and symbolic crossing of borders. The complex paradigm of European identity is an object of artistic observation and interpretation. This observation, analysis, and critique leads to the emergence of multiple art discourses questioning the geo-politics of Europe and addressing the issues of identity. However, today the notion of identity, both individual and collective, arouses many doubts, if one considers the processes of globalization, migration and other forms of mobility, diasporas, exclusion, the merging of cultures, hybridization of traditions. The question of what it means to be European seems not to be regarded as important even among the EU citizens. Instead, various alternative forms of identification prevail. People identify themselves most often by their nationality, gender, profession, religion, sub-culture, but not as being European. The processes of mediatization and medialization contribute to the complexity of the issue. In such realities, we can only try to develop a socially attractive concept of 'Europeaness', or, following the theory of Giorgio Agamben, to reconsider the concept of 'community without identity', whose members do not necessarily share the essential attributes, but play the roles of different instantiations of the category. The United States of Europe exhibition, which visited a number of European cities in 2011-2013, grappled with the issues of representing Europe and aimed to analyse and discuss the problems associated with the construction of Europeaness. The exhibition was produced by Johanna Suo, and curated by Anna Bitkina, Ryszard W. Kluszczyński and Sinziana Ravini. In spite of the declared intention of searching for the possibility of European cultural integration and common identity, the curators invited the artists who cast some doubt upon this very possibility. Luchezar Boyadjiev, for instance, examined the historical components of national identities. Anna Konik drew our attention to the consequences of poverty, homelessness, and marginalization. Gerda
Choice Reviews Online, 1999
This third, revised and augmented edition of Peter Rietbergen's highly acclaimed Europe: A Cultural History provides a major and original contribution to the study of Europe. From ancient Babylonian law codes to Pope Urban's call to crusade in 1095, and from Michelangelo on Italian art in 1538 to Sting's songs in the late twentieth century, the expressions of the culture that has developed in Europe are diverse and wide-ranging. This exceptional text expertly connects this variety, explaining them to the reader in a thorough and yet highly readable style. Presented chronologically, Europe: A Cultural History examines the many cultural building blocks of Europe, stressing their importance in the formation of the continent's ever-changing cultural identities. Starting with the beginnings of agricultural society and ending with the mass culture of the early twenty-first century, the book uses literature, art, science, technology and music to examine Europe's cultural history in terms of continuity and change. Rietbergen looks at how societies developed new ways of surviving, believing, consuming and communicating throughout the period. His book is distinctive in paying particular attention to the ways early Europe has been formed through the impact of a variety of cultures, from Celtic and German to Greek and Roman. The role of Christianity is stressed, but as a contested variable, as are the influences from, for example, Asia in the early modern period and from American culture and Islamic immigrants in more recent times. Since anxieties over Europe's future mount, this third edition text has been thoroughly revised for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moreover, it now also includes a 'dossier' of some seventeen essay-like vignettes that highlight cultural phenomena said to be characteristic of Europe: social solidarity, capitalism, democracy and so forth. With a wide selection of illustrations, maps, excerpts of sources and even lyrics from contemporary songs to support the arguments, this book both serves the general reader as well as students of historical and cultural studies.