Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism
This fine interdisciplinary study incorporates the history of the middle class, art, and literature as it historicizes the ways in which white famles participated in, produced, and benefited from Americans' ambivalent fascination with Japan and China and contributed to the feminization of American orientalism during the Gilded Age.
Contents: Horizons in Post-Colonial Studies; Introduction; Placing Edward Said: Space Time and the Travelling Theorist; Nothing in the Post? -- Said and the Problem of Post-Colonial Intellectuals; Edward Said and/versus Raymond Williams; Worldliness; Orientalism as Post-Imperial Witnessing; Europe's Occidentalisms; The Evolution of Orientalism and Africanist Political Science; Post-Colonialism as Neo-Orientalism: Sarojini Naidu and Arundhati Roy; The Site of Memory; Index.
In this highly acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering Orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation – a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the ‘otherness’ of Eastern culture, customs and beliefs.
To commemorate the tercentenary of the first Western edition of The Arabian Nights, Yamanaka and Nishio marry Western and Japanese perspectives to analyze the rich cross-cultural fertilization that ensued. Arabian Nights and Orientalism examines narrative motifs, and relates them to other cultures, traditions, and forms of representation. The authors place the tales in a whole range of new contexts, from 19th century British feminism to ancient Greek romance. This lavishly illustrated book explores the interplay between image and text in various editions, and sheds new light on the tales' origin in the Persian professional storytelling tradition. Robert Irwin's foreword offers an overview of critical responses to The Arabian Nights, which highlights the originality of this volume.
