IMAGINING THE WORLD

Tengku Nurshazliyana bt Tengku Sahrum

Siti Nazihah bt Mohamad Hanapi

JOHN MANDDEVILLE: CHAPTER XVII

ETHIOPIA

People are slightly drunken

They turned black when they grow older

Large foot

Have one foot only

Many diverse folk

Live not longLittle appetite to

meat

A TEXTUALISED WORLD

Imagined geographies

inhabited by imagined others, people who were very different from Europeans.

described the world to people, explained their place within it, shaping how people responded to the world.

IMAGINED OTHERS

Transformation of the Europeans in one way to another.

Transformation of body: these people had huge ears, with their faces on their chest, were giants or pigmies.

Transformation of Gender: hairy women, Amazons and androgenes.

Transformation of life cycle: these people were said to rear children just once or to conceive at five years of age.

Transformation of social: wife-gavers, who were repeatedly an amiable race who give their wives to any travellers who stopped among them.

Transformation of needs: Astomi, who lived near the headwaters of the Ganges, were said neither to eat nor drink but existed by smelling roots, flowers and fruits.

Europeans were always seen as the reference point, Europeans always represented what was right and normal.

Less bizarrely different peoples. Ex: Ethiopians – black men in the mountains of Africa – were understood to have been burnt black because of their close proximity to the sun.

Aristotle’s Cosmology

Frigid Zone

Frigid Zone

Temperate Zone

Temperate Zone

Torrid Zone

ORIENTALISM

• Study of languages and traditions of the Middle East.

• Edward Said’s redefines, ubiquity of a sense of the division of the world into two spheres in aesthetic production, popular culture, and scholarly, sociological, and historical texts.

ORIENTALISM IS AN IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHY FOR TWO REASONS

Projected a single culture into the space of the orient that was at odds with the diversity of peoples,

cultures and environments

This space was defined by texts and not by people from the Orient itself. These texts preceded

experience.

ORIENTALISM

Power emerged through institutions and

practices used.

Those resident in the space of the Orient

were not allowed to speak for

themselves.

Always described by others,

characterised by others.

Made up of a series of discourses that

explained the nature of the Orient (east) and

Occident (west)

Themes/ Discourses

• What is discourse?

That thing or system of ideas and beliefs and

words (the forms of “knowledge”), that sets

limits upon and yet produces what one person

is able to think or say or do in a given situation.

It is what makes you think or produces what you

say or think. It uses you as much as you use it.

Discourse can be thought of as a lens

through which people interpret the world,

which is not unchanging but is temporarily

and spatially specific.

Discourse is about the use of knowledge and ideas, including their influence on

people, as much as the actual content or meaning of such ideas.

Rationality:rational : irrational

Orientalism

Occident: Orient

Religionreligious : heathen

Science:science : superstition

Race

Development:developed : backward

Moralitymoral : immoral

1. Development and time

Orient - Europe

1. backward - developed

2. unchanging - dynamic (Enlightenment, the drive of mercantile capitalism/ Industrial Revolution)

Orient -

3. Egyptians and Chinese

had great societies before

Europe had developed

BUT these civilisations were

now seen to be in decline.

4. Asia and North Africa –

old, decrepit, decaying civilisations

Orient - Europe

5. Sub-Saharan African dynamic yet mature

(endeveloped) and child-like

- It was the duty of Europeans to rule the ‘immature’ peoples in Africa because – not sufficiently mature enough to govern themselves.

2. Morality

Orient - Europe

1. immoral “white-man’s burden’ to improve the Orient’s morals.

How it was invoked..

Assessments of

other cultures of

religious practices Order and hygiene

Sexuality – Orient often

seen as a place of

unrestrained sexuality

Discussions and

laziness – Orient (not

productive)

3. Rationality

Orient - Europe

1. Irrational (not accepting notions of science and reasons

of European science – turning

into animistic beliefs and magic.

“backward”

4. Religion

• Orientalism did not accept Hinduism, Islam, other than non-Christian religions – TRUE RELIGIONS instead MYTHS and BELIEFS.

• Orientals were NOT religious and should be converted to Christianity.

5. Science

• ‘proof’ of western superiority

• European science had allowed people to conquer nature, time and space, the body

• Africans and others were seen to be living with nature.

• Natives were unable to exploit natural resources and transform nature

• European diseases killed many indigenous peoples

Medicine conquered

illness

Morality controlled natural bodily

desires

Mining extracted resources from

nature

Travel conquered time and space

6. Race

• ‘scientific’ category of European domination

• Measurable biological facts ( head shape or brain size) – explaining western superiority.

ORIENTALIST ART

• Paintings are interesting

- Broad appeal

- For the majority of Europeans, paintings were the only insight they had into the Orient.

- Presented incredible detail, convincing viewers of their authenticity through the ‘reality effect’

The Fanatics of Tangier, Delacroix, 1838

Delacroix, 1838

‘their enthusiasm excited by prayers and wildcries, they enter into a veritable state ofintoxication, and, spreading through thestreets, perform a thousand contortions, andeven dangerous acts.’

Dance of the Almeh, Gerome, 1863

Gerome, 1863

Women revelling in the pleasure ofWILD and RELEASED SENSUALITY(impossible to depict European womenat the time). Erotic, on excess, andmale fantasies played out in sites oflanguid opulence.

Gateway to the Great Temple at Balbec, Roberts,

1841

David Robert, 1841

Ruined greatness and an impliedcriticism of the local people forNEGLECTING their own monuments –architecture falls into decay. (decayingcivilisations themselves.

ORIENTALISM IN THE PRESENT

• Orientalism is still with us but in a slightly different form.

• The west is no longer just Europe, now the United States of America – become more influential (Hollywood)

George W. Bush’s ‘War of Terror’

• September 11th 2001.

• Created a binary imagined geography that has divided the world into the WEST and the ‘axis of evil’ to the EAST.

Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of civilisations”

• Between the WEST(secular-Christian west) and ISLAM (Islamic East)

• The events of September 11th seemed to prove the theory, despite various voices, including Said and Huntington himself, which insisted that this was the action of a small group of extremists rather than being representative of Islam more generally.

CRITIQUE OF ORIENTALISM

Occidentalism

RetextualisationGender

Historical Differences

1. Occidentalism

• Said reduces all of Europe (and later also North America) to the Occident.

• There are traditions of ‘Occidentalism’, representations of Europe and its culture from the non-Western world.

• Orientalism X Occidentalism

(POWER)

2. Historical Difference

• While we can trace the continued existence of themes from Orientalism into contemporary culture, clearly some things are different today

• The way we view the images of the rest of the world which used to be taken for granted

3. Gender

• Critiqued for an implicit gendering of the Orient as FEMALE.

• Men who are active and capable, and women are passive and unable to represent themselves.

• Feminists have argued that western women travellers produced very different accounts because of the power relations they experienced at home.

Retextualisation

• No one can provide a true representation of reality, all is constructed through discourse.

• Now the Orientalists’ texts are replaced by Said’s text.