Book Review: Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History: From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by James Hodkinson and John Walker (original) (raw)
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The anthropological turn of German philosophical Orientalism and its legacy
現象學與人文科學期刊 Journal of Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, 12 : 41-112, 2021
This paper aims to address the anthropological dimension of Kant’s, Hegel’s and Heidegger’s representations of Chinese cultural achievements. By deconstructing not only the culturalist assumptions of European modern philosophers about Chinese culture but also those of contemporary Chinese thinkers about European culture, this paper also aims to question the methodology of comparative studies. Philosophy is intercultural when it stresses the cultural specificity of a philosopher deemed “representative”; it becomes transcultural when it resorts to philosophers who had the courage to deconstruct their own (real or perceived) cultural assumptions and their beliefs about their own “spiritual superiority” or “civilizational exceptionalism”.
Response to Margaret Olin's review of German Orientalism in the Age of Empire
Journal of Art Historiography, 2011
First of all it is an honor to have received such a careful and on the whole favorable review of my German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (2009) in this journal, and from the keyboard of Margaret Olin. I read Peg Olin's dissertation on Riegl (later published Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl's Theory of Art (1992) as a grad student at the University of Chicago; it was what sparked my interest in the Austrian School of art history; together with her book on the image of Jewish art (The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses about 'Jewish Art' [2001]), her work continues to set the gold standard for studies in art historiography. I am also very pleased that Olin thinks my book has utility for others involved in this field and that I have a little space in this review to offer a little more food for thought on the subject of the study of oriental art in the Germanspeaking world. I also want to issue a couple of mea culpas and ask some more questions about where we are now in the orientalism debate, questions directed at least as much to myself as to Olin and our readers. First the mea culpas. I did not know that Riegl had actually gone to Egypt and I am interested to know that he did, and that he missed going to Jordan, too, because of ill-health. One wonders what he might have seen and written had he not died at the young age of 47; his nemesis, Josef Strzygowski, lived to be 79, dying only in 1941 and having produced many more books that Riegl might have corrected or refuted with his expertise and his generally much more liberal outlook (though I concede that he, like his contemporaries, surely did have his prejudices against 'orientals'). Riegl might have helped develop a non-racist study of oriental art, something Strzygowski certainly did not do. But, as abhorrent as Strzygowski's racial theories are, we should not dismiss the enormous influence he exerted on scholars in western Europe and in the non-western world. It turns out that he had quite a following in Turkey and in India, as well as in Central Europe and Scandinavia. I have written two essays on this subject which I hope will appear sometime in the near future and may provide those interested in 'orientalist' art historiography a bit more detail than the book was able to offer. Another sin of omission I willingly own up to is my failure to deal with visual aspects of German orientalism. To be truthful, I was not at all sure that I could do this subject-another large and diverse one, with a long and complicated history as well as diverse sub-components-justice. New and interesting work is
En English: Through a number of cases forgotten by postcolonial critique, this book explores the notion of “ margins ”, geographical as well as epistemological, in the context of Said’s orientalism. Bringing together the Anglo-Indian case, often considered as a classical form of orientalism, and the Russo-Soviet case, both an object of Western orientalism and itself a producer of orientalist discourses, the study invites a shift in perspective from imperial Franco-British spaces towards less traditional comparisons. Going beyond a binary model, which opposes “ colonizers ” and “ colonized ”, the approach analyzes the mechanisms of knowledge production (arts, languages, literatures, religions etc.) and their transfers in colonial settings, as well as local appropriations and (re)inventions of hybrid traditions. Crossing perspectives in such a way helps to analyze the ambiguity of situations that unfolded during and after periods of imperial domination in the triangle of India, Russia and Europe. En français: A travers divers exemples oubliés de la critique postcoloniale, cet ouvrage explore la notion des marges, aussi bien géographiques qu’épistémologiques, dans le contexte de l’orientalisme dénoncé par Edward Saïd. Mettant en parallèle le cas angloindien, souvent présenté comme un « orientalisme classique », et le cas russo-soviétique, à la fois objet de l’orientalisme occidental et producteur d’un discours « orientaliste », il s’agit de décentrer le regard des espaces impériaux franco-britanniques vers des comparaisons moins traditionnelles. Dépassant le modèle binaire « colonisateur – colonisé », cette approche analyse le mécanisme de la constitution des savoirs (arts, langues, littératures, religions, etc.) et leurs transferts en situation coloniale, ainsi que les appropriations locales et les (ré)inventions de traditions hybrides. Le jeu des regards croisés permet de traduire toute l’ambiguïté des situations qui se sont succédé pendant et après les périodes de domination impériale dans le triangle constitué par l’Inde, la Russie et l’Europe. Compte rendus: Marlène Laruelle, in Russian Review, 2016, vol. 75, n° 2, p. 320-321 ; Michel Boivin, in BCAI : Bulletin Critique des Annales Islamologiques, n° 30, 2017, p. 116-117