Reflections on Architectural History Forty Years after Edward Said's Orientalism

Abstract

This journal's acknowledgment of Edward Said's impact on our discipline on the fortieth anniversary of Orientalism marks a significant turn. No other scholar and no other single book outside the field have been given this kind of attention. Despite the fact that the cover of Orientalism , which featured Jean-Leon Gerome's painting The Snake Charmer as a shorthand to the book's contents, triggered loaded questions about the power of visual representation, Said himself did not engage with architecture and did so only marginally with art (Figure 1). Architectural and urban historians, and not only those working on “non-Western” topics, nevertheless found a fertile field of inspiration in Said's work. Figure 1 Edward Said, Orientalism , 1978 (photo courtesy Penguin Random House). The book appeared just as architectural historians were becoming increasingly fascinated with critical theory and philosophy. The subsequent haste to construct scholarly bridges between built forms and “higher” intellectual realms has created some curious outcomes, such as a series of short books that is perhaps sarcastically titled Thinkers for Architects. These books summarize the work of theorists from Immanuel Kant to Luce Irigaray, but only as their thinking pertains to and serves architecture.1 For better or for worse, Said and his work have not (yet) been included in this group, and thus the place dedicated to Orientalism here, in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians , is especially meaningful (Figure 2). Figure 2 Edward Said (photo by Brigitte Lacombe, courtesy of Mariam Said). In this essay, I do not seek to provide a comprehensive and neutral map of the past four decades of architectural history; rather, I will filter some of the developments that have arisen in the aftermath of Orientalism 's publication through my subjective lens as a scholar, a critic, and a teacher. I have been taking …