A selection of key readings that provide an introduction to the intense 20th century debates around Orientalism
In the period of decolonization that followed World War II, a number of scholars, mainly Middle Eastern, launched a sustained assault on Orientalism the theory and practice of representing the "East" in Western thought accusing its practitioners of misrepresentation, prejudice and bias. An intense debate ensued, involving not only Orientalists but historians, sociologists, anthropologists, literary critics, scholars of cultural studies and gender studies as well as the news media.
Orientalism: A Reader provides students, scholars and general readers alike with a selection of key readings from this debate, covering a range of areas including myth, imperialism, the cultural perspective, Marxist interpretation and feminist approaches. The aim is to introduce the origins and character of the debate on Orientalism, providing a useful overview of a controversial and problematic concept from a multidisciplinary perspective. Coverage begins with late 19th-century material from thinkers such as Hegel and Marx, and moves through extracts from Nietzsche, Gramsci and Foucault to contemporary work from, Brian Turner, John Mackenzie and Edward Said. As well as a general introduction, each section and extract is introduced and there is a detailed guide to further reading.
Contributors: Anouar Abdel-Malek, Aijaz Ahmad, Sadik Jalal al-'Azm, Fred Dallmayr, Michel Foucault, Francesco Gabrieli, Antonio Gramsci, G.W.F Hegel, Ronald Inden, Richard King, David Kopf, Bernard Lewis, Donald P. Little, L. Lowe, John MacKenzie, Pierre Martino, Karl Marx, Billie Melman, James Mill, B.J. Moore-Gilbert, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sheldon Pollock, Michael Richardson, Edward Said, Stuart Schaar, Raymond Schwab, A.L. Tibawi, Bryan S. Turner and Ernest J. Wilson III.
Industry Reviews
"As his beautiful book makes abundantly clear, Jose is on a mission to change the world, or at least to imagine (I'm quoting) 'a place and time... fuller, vaster, more sensual, brighter.'... Jose's is a book which sustains rigor even as it occasionally indulges in the anecdotal."-Barbara Browning, Social Text/Periscope, "Cruising Utopia opens in full song, in a complex contrapuntal (Cuban?) chant, equal parts poetry and counterpolemic, in order to usher in a crowd, a choreographic mass of often queer interlocutors as likely to come from a literary (O'Hara, Schuyler, Myles) as from a critical-philosophical (beyond the Germans, and perhaps too briefly: Butler, Felman, Sedgwick) tradition, as from the worlds of art, pop, and performance. "-Ricardo Ortiz, Social Text/Periscope, "I love the "Public Sex" and "After Jack" chapters the best, and think the O'Hara discussion is brilliant and perfectly emblematic of the project to extract the utopian from moments of affective density that are lived. But all of the writing is astonishing, vibrant and memorable."-Lauren Berlant, Social Text/Periscope, "In both Cruising Utopia and Disidentifications, Mu-oz traces his queer theoretical genealogy through sources as varied as women-of-color feminism on the one hand, and a certain tradition of Marxian thought on the other. He cruises theory, moving seamlessly from Anzald a and Alarc--n to Ernst Bloch, CLR James, Adorno, Derrida and Raymond Williams, those figures in leftist thought whose work is not typically mined within queer scholarship. Similarly if we trace the genealogy of what has now come to be known as queer of color and queer diasporic critique, Mu-oz's work--with its insistence on the endlessly imaginative modes of being that emerge within queer, and particularly queer of color, subcultures--stands as a crucial milestone."-Gayatri Gopinath, Social Text/Periscope, "In this interesting study of queerness and identity politics, Munoz (performance studies, New York Univ.) invites readers to look beyond the immediate present and toward a queer future."-CHOICE,
