Rethinking Orientalism —— Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem

Name: Rethinking Orientalism
Rating: 5
ISBN: 9781860647307

----- 重新思考东方主义：妇女，旅行和奥斯曼帝国

ISBN: 9781860647307 出版年：2004 页码：314 Reina Lewis Bloomsbury Publishing

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内容简介

pp.297 Supported by grants from the AHRC, and Leverhulme Trust, this monograph (translated into Turkish, 2006) was the culmination of a longstanding body of work concerned with gender and Orientalism, and it has contributed new primary material and analytic frameworks for a number of related fields. While the figure of the oppressed, yet highly sexualised, female inmate of the Muslim harem has been understood as the pivot of western Orientalist fantasy (Yegenoglu 1998; Zonana 1993), little attention has been paid to the voices of self identified âOrientalâ women. Rethinking Orientalism remedies this by providing the first monograph on English-language books by Ottoman women from the turn of the twentieth century. Arguing that non-Western sources deserve critical attention of the same rigour as would be directed as canonical texts, my primary research on Ottoman womenâs writing in English demonstrates that they were able to intervene in Orientalist culture with a self-conscious ability to manipulate cultural codes that is not usually attributed to the inferiorised, silenced woman of the harem stereotype. The project extended the range of primary material available to the developing field of middle-eastern womenâs history (Frierson 2000; Baron 1994; Booth 2001) and changed the ways in which womenâs sources are analysed by integrating theories of performative gender identity into the historicised critical examination of non-Western cultural texts. My research into publishersâ archives, literary reviews and author correspondence in Europe, Turkey and the USA meant that I could construct a materialist analysis of the conditions of production and reception of middlebrow Western harem literature. My analysis of how the Ottoman authors intervened in local debates about female and social emancipation challenges some of the orthodoxies that have emerged in postcolonial studies. The project has prompted international keynotes and plenary papers, including Vienna, Berlin, Kuwait, USA (Tulsa, MIT), Toronto, Helsinki, Trier, Limerick.

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Amazon Customer

This book is about five women writers and travelers in the early decades of the twentieth century in the Ottoman Empire. The authors gives detailed information about these women, and then goes on to analyze their writings in a theoretical framework that is both resonant of Said's Orientalism and critical of it. Through these women's lives and writings, we can know that elite Turkish women at that time were active in public activities. They were aware of the Empire's problems, but they knew the native people had to work it out on their own instead of just imitating the Western ways of life. Said's Orientalism depicts oriental people as passive and silent, whereas this book shows us a more complicated and subtle picture of the interactions between the East and the West. Scholars who are interested in postcolonial feminism will find this book interesting and useful for either teaching or researching.

Amazon Customer

This book is about five women writers and travelers in the early decades of the twentieth century in the Ottoman Empire. The authors gives detailed information about these women, and then goes on to analyze their writings in a theoretical framework that is both resonant of Said's Orientalism and critical of it. Through these women's lives and writings, we can know that elite Turkish women at that time were active in public activities. They were aware of the Empire's problems, but they knew the native people had to work it out on their own instead of just imitating the Western ways of life. Said's Orientalism depicts oriental people as passive and silent, whereas this book shows us a more complicated and subtle picture of the interactions between the East and the West.Scholars who are interested in postcolonial feminism will find this book interesting and useful for either teaching or researching.

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