Week 26: East/West

Orientalist Art:

Tends to be depicted as:

• Exotic, inaccessible, unknowable

• Hyper-sexualised

  • Depictions of harems

• Feminised

• Associated with body not the mind

• Associated with nature

• Backwards, lawless, or barbaric

Orientalism summary:

• Gendered

• Not just about stereotyping the Orient

• A system that produces knowledge that is codified in a certain way to reproduce a particular ideology that justifies and legitimises colonialism

Therefore, it has more to do with the West than the Orient

Stuart Hall and the “West”

• 1932-2014

• Jamaican-born cultural theorist, sociologist and political activist

The West & the rest: key dogmas

The West is:

• Historical, not geographical and “not a place”

• European exploration and imperialism justified by racial stereotypes of the ‘rest’ (Noble/ignoble savages)

• Underpinned by Enlightenment thinking - the idea that there is only one route to civilisation

“Our ideas of ‘East’ and ‘West’ have never been free of myth and fantasy, and even to this day they are not primarily ideas about place and geography”

Functions of the “West”

• A system of classificaition

• A system of representation (verbal and visual images)

• A model of comparison between societies

• An ideology, e.g. maps = fiction → Mercator map

The West and the Rest: to sum up

The ‘West’ is a discourse that:

• Based on binaries

• Hierarchical

• Assumes the two parts of the dichotomy (West/Rest) are homogenous

• Gendered