Edited by Sucheta Mazumdar (NHC Fellow, 2007–08), Vasant Kaiwar, and Thierry Labica This book uses a historical and theoretical focus to examine the key of issues of the Enlightenment, Orientalism, concepts of identity and difference, and the contours of different modernities in relation to both local and global shaping forces, including the spread of capitalism. … Continued
By Steven C. Caton (NHC Fellow, 1992–93) Combining ethnography, film criticism, and his extensive knowledge of the Middle East, Steven C. Caton presents an innovative and fascinating examination of the classic film, Lawrence of Arabia. Caton is interested in why this epic film has been so compelling for so many people for more than three decades. … Continued
By Michèle Longino (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) Michele Longino examines the ways in which Mediterranean exoticism alters the themes in French classical drama through the exploration of such plays by Corneille, Moliere and Racine as Le Cid, Medee, and Le bourgeois gentilhomme among others. She considers the role that the staging of the near Orient played … Continued
By David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) The West has been accused of seeing the East in a hostile and deprecatory light, as the legacy of nineteenth-century European imperialism. In this highly original and controversial book, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye examines Russian thinking about the Orient before the Revolution of 1917. Exploring … Continued
By Joseph Allen Boone (NHC Fellow, 2009–10) One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions of Orientalism. … Continued
By Madeleine Dobie (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) In Trading Places, Madeleine Dobie explores the place of the colonial world in the culture of the French Enlightenment. She shows that until a turning point in the late 1760s questions of colonization and slavery occupied a very marginal position in literature, philosophy, and material and visual culture. In an … Continued
Refashionings of a medieval past have always inspired the popular imagination. The current revival of medievalism, that is the creative interpretation or recreation of the European Middle Ages, is comparable to earlier ones (the Romantic period for example), but what is new is that medievalism has become a global phenomenon. The series Game of Thrones … Continued
Far too often, the Middle East appears as doubly alien: out of place and out of time. A century of popular culture caricatures, at least two centuries of Orientalist representations, and decades of American military interventions, have all fed into the notion of the Middle East as turmoil-laden, sectarian and tribal pre-modern world. In this … Continued
The study of contested territory for me has alway been a story of land and/or ideological dispute between colonial powers, regional peoples, religious factions, or other distinctions that come into play as humans acquire land and promulgate cultural traits and ideologies. Contested territory is more than a story of “us versus them” or “them vs. … Continued