Orientalist Tropes Research Articles

Decoding the Orientalist Paradigm: A Critical Analysis of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire

In his book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin constructs a fantasyland of Westeros and Essos in which he employs a Eurocentric perspective through Orientalist tropes. This reveals a cultural, educational, and political dichotomy between his fictional Orient and Occident, depicting a more civilised and superior Westland and a more exotic and barbaric Eastland. Throughout the five books, Essos, which stands for Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, is always associated with barbaric and magical rituals, nakedness, slavery, savagery, and exotic and erotic elements, and is therefore depicted as a more dangerous landscape to live in. Westeros which represents Europe on the other hand, is portrayed as more civilised, educated, and chivalric, bestowed with every so-called superior European and Christian value. In this context, this study attempts to interrogate Edward Said’s post-colonial critique of Orientalism to elucidate the manifestations of the Eurocentric paradigm inherent in George R.R. Martin’s world-building techniques within his magnum opus, A Song of Ice and Fire, and to dissect the implications of the Orientalism within the broad spectrum of fantasy literature. To this end, through a close reading of the novels, this article will foreground the contrast between Westeros and Essos, highlighting the central position of Western societies and the otherisation of Eastern cultures by detailing the elements that perpetuate the superiority of the Occident and the inferiority of the Orient in Martin's fictional world.

From a ‘Peaceful and Prosperous China’ to ‘the China Virus’: Examining the Framing of China Through American Political Rhetoric

Abstract The period comprising the past thirty-two years since the collapse of the Soviet Union has seen a range of approaches taken by the United States in handling its relationship with China. Launched in November 2011, the ‘Pivot to Asia’ policy approach entailed new levels of engagement with ‘a peaceful and prosperous China’, but on the most challenging issues this approach also brought increasing confrontation. The West (in this case the United States) has a history of utilising Orientalist-style, ‘us vs them’ dichotomies to manipulate unequal relations of power with the East (known as the ‘Orient’) throughout history (originally with middle-eastern nations). By using tenets from Edward Said’s Orientalism and critical discourse analysis adapted from Normal Fairclough’s 3-dimensional model, this article seeks to establish whether the foreign policy rhetoric of the United States has shifted to frame China through an Orientalist worldview since the Obama Administration’s “Pivot to Asia” strategy in late 2011. The article analyses 52 speeches from the Obama and Trump Administrations, finding evidence of pro-orientalist themes and language being adopted for both. Whilst utilised to a lower degree, these ‘us vs them’ dichotomies do exist under President Obama’s more accommodating and calmer linguistic-style, being intertwined with language designed to project an image of welcoming cooperation (albeit in a condescending, back-handed way). The use of orientalist themes is more prominently provable under President Trump, with almost all major speeches pertaining to China containing high usage of orientalist tropes in a more openly xenophobic, racist fashion.

Colonizing Frank Moore Cross: The Dead Sea Scrolls in 1950s Popular Media

Abstract Early presentations of the Dead Sea Scrolls in popular media relied on orientalist tropes and a narrow Christian horizon to create relevance and prestige for the scrolls, which contributed to strong religious interest in them and a market for unprovenanced Dead Sea Scrolls fragments and forgeries. Such a strategy also constructed public authority for the Bible scholars working on the scrolls. This article treats the colonialist approach in the earliest popular works on the scrolls in the United States, written by Edmund Wilson, Frank Moore Cross, and Alex Small, and shows how the stories they tell set the stage for religious veneration of the scrolls and popular acclaim of the scholars.

Witnessing the Architecture of a Cancellation: The Silencing of Voices on Palestine in Austrian Academia

This article analyzes the cancellation of a public lecture by Palestinian scholar, Walaa Alqaisiya, during a curatorial program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in May 2022 due to false accusations of antisemitism in the context of anti-Palestinian racism in Austria. We speak of an ‘architecture’ because we analyze the questions of power, (in)visibility and erasure from the point of view of the public and institutional spaces, asking who can speak, about what and for whom, when? As a collective of former participants, we write from an implicated positionality that we call ‘participatory witnesses:’ the program ceased to be an abstract exploration of decolonial and queer/feminist perspectives, and transformed us affectively and politically, forcing us to critically respond to the censorship. We start by summarizing the unfolding of events and introducing the figure of the participatory witness and the concept of architecture. Then, we turn to Austrian academia’s climate of censorship of Palestinian perspectives. From this context, we analyze Alqaisiya’s cancellation through the prism of Euromodern Orientalist tropes, disciplinary strategies and civilizational discourses employed to continue the marginalization and exclusion of Palestinian perspectives. We pay particular attention to the significance of silencing queer Palestinian voices in the context of Israeli pinkwashing. Finally, we mnemonically map our attempts at navigating the architecture, negotiating between reclaiming public visibility for queer Palestinian perspectives and collective acts of refusal and delinking.

Kurban Said’s The Girl from the Golden Horn (1938): Play with Orientalism in Inter-War Berlin and Vienna

ABSTRACT: Das Mädchen vom Goldenen Horn ( The Girl from the Golden Horn ), a novel published in 1938 in Vienna under the pseudonym Kurban Said, was most likely written by Lev Nussimbaum, a multilingual exile from Azerbaijan, who converted from Judaism to Islam in Berlin in the early 1920s and published widely under the name Essad Bey. Although virtually unknown, this novel deserves an important place in the global history of German literature on account of its complexity and self-conscious play with literary and cultural traditions, especially the long-standing presence of Islam in German-speaking Europe, and the Orientalist tropes associated with it.

Dubai-gate and the libidinal operations of nation-making in Girls from Dubai

The article provides a critical review of the film Girls to Buy (Dziewczyny z Dubaju) (2021) by Maria Sadowska in the context of the Polish Dubai-gate scandal and the discourse of the sex trade and trafficking. The intersection of gender, ethnicity and class guides this inquiry into the ways in which both the conservative Polish nationalist agenda and the neo-liberal opposition to such an agenda rely on the phobic Orientalist tropes that configure the Arab world as the main culprit and the ‘face’ of the kleptocratic capitalism.

Visions of the East: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Memoirs of Crimean War Nurses

ABSTRACT The article examines the memoirs of four women who provided nursing care in the Crimean War: Mary Seacole, Elizabeth Davis, Martha Nicol and Fanny Margaret Taylor. It argues that these memoirs are also Orientalist travelogues that reflect the women’s participation in Britain’s informal empire in the eastern Mediterranean. These women used Orientalist tropes, such as scenic vistas, idle servants and foreign customs like the harem, to attract a readership for their publications. Additionally, by allying themselves with the British civilizing mission, these women sought acceptance from British society. The middle-class volunteer nurses, like Fanny Margaret Taylor or Martha Nicol, attempted to excuse their seemingly unconventional behavior in journeying far from the traditional female domestic sphere to serve as war nurses, while Elizabeth Davis, a working-class nurse, aimed to overcome the stereotypes of intemperance and immorality associated with her profession. Finally, as a mixed-race woman, Mary Seacole faced a great difficulty in gaining the sympathy of her white British readership but by intensively associating herself with the British military and its customs, she gained the affection of the British public.

The Arab American Polyphonic Novel and Its Indictment of the Post-9/11 Political Agenda

Following 9/11, the United States, led at the time by the George W. Bush administration, formulated and disseminated a political narrative replete with falsehoods and rigid binaries intended to justify changes to its domestic and foreign policy. That narrative was based on Orientalist tropes and American exceptionalism – ideas which have been part of American political discourse for more than a century. Two post-9/11 multi-narrator novels – Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) and Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans (2019) – respond to the dominant political narrative by deconstructing the binaries it is based on and by demonstrating its harmfulness to American society. Through close readings that analyze the ideological implications of the polyphonic novel form, this paper reveals that Halaby’s and Lalami’s novels implicate the narrative in the destructive political polarization of the 2000s and the 2010s while subverting persistent modes of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of polyphony and dialogism, as well as Jody Byrd’s concept of cacophony, clarify the ways that narration is used in Once in a Promised Land and The Other Americans to enable the indictment of the post-9/11 narrative.

The “Other” in Court: Islam and Muslims in Polish Judicial Opinions Published Online

Muslims are a marginal minority in Poland, but research shows that they are often subject to negative perceptions and hostility from the majority. Orientalist stereotypes about Islam and the people associated with it are widespread and often reproduced in the media. Research from North America and the European Court of Human Rights suggests that such prejudices can affect the adjudication of cases involving Muslims. It may be presumed that Poland is no exception to that, and this assumption was the starting point for our empirical study. To date, there have been no studies on the perception of Muslims and Islam in the Polish legal system. This article presents the results of a qualitative thematic analysis of 57 judicial opinions issued by the common courts in Poland and published online, in which Islam or being Muslim was mentioned. The cases were categorised and texts of the judicial opinions closely analysed (with computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software) to identify recurring themes. The findings of this first exploratory study show that stereotypical representations and the “‘Othering” of Muslims do indeed occur in Polish courts, with some judges repeating Orientalist tropes that have become normalised in Polish society.

The Coloniality of Contemporary Human Rights Discourses on ‘Honour’ in and Around the United Nations

In United Nations (UN) human rights reporting and analysis, ‘honour’ has been systematically conflated with ‘honour-related violence’ (HRV). However, honour and HRV are not the same thing. In this article I examine contemporary UN human rights discourses around honour. I argue that these discourses are underpinned by racialised and orientalist-colonial imaginaries which falsely categorise people and places as either having or not having honour. This conflation presents honour as a cultural problem attributed to racialised communities mostly associated with the Muslim World. Adopting a critical post- and de-colonial perspective, I undertake a discourse analysis of UN human rights documents to expose orientalist tropes that reproduce epistemic and material violence against honour. There are three strategies employed to commit this violence: first, through the reduction of honour to physical and emotional HRV—a violence predicated upon the logic of coloniality and the orientalist division of the world into modern and pre-modern states; second, by associating honour as violence with Muslims and migrant communities, the discourse furthers structural Islamophobia; third, by reproducing colonial saviour narratives that designate honour as control over women’s sexuality. The human rights discourse on honour forecloses upon alternative ways of understanding what honour is and means for those who live with it. As such, the international human rights discourse on honour extends the coloniality of power and the geopolitics of knowledge.

Study on the Innovative Victorian Style Decanters

This essay focuses on the Victorian Orientalist perspective. And cross-culture is shown by Victorian decanters. Victoria Orientalism shows the influence of Orientalist tropes and ideas. Firstly, this article expands the interaction between Chinese Export Ceramics in traditional function and the cultural connotation of Chinese ceramics. And then it overviews the designer William Burges and his ceramics (Chinoiserie) as a representation of his collection aesthetic. An alternative way of looking at the objects that values usual hybrid forms and that focuses on fused cultures is proposed.

From Race and Orientalism in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Caste and Indigenous Otherness on the Indian Screen

The article discusses an Indian film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream entitled 10ml Love (dir. Sharat Katariya, 2012). There is little scholarship on 10ml Love, which has been studied mainly as an independent film in Hinglish that depicts the lives of the cosmopolitan youth in urban India. Drawing upon recent readings of the play that identify elements of racism and whiteness as well as an analysis from an Orientalist lens that sees India as a gendered utopia, I suggest that the film adaptation highlights not racial/white supremacy but caste supremacy; furthermore, it indulges not in Orientalist tropes but tropes of indigenous Otherness based on religion, gender, caste, and class. I argue that this film presents two opposing political utopias—a right-wing utopia that stands for the maintenance of traditional values and a left-wing utopia that attempts to challenge, question, and subvert the conservative order. However, 10ml Love seems to endorse neither of the two utopias wholly; its reality appears to lie between the two utopias, a reality that is marked by stereotypes of Otherness. This paper analyses the audio-visual depiction of the tension between the utopias at both the ends of the political spectrum, as well as the realities of Otherness created by the presence of various social locations and identities in Indian society.

“The way to someone’s heart is through their stomach”

Immigrant writing is a unique forum that provides insight into both immigrant and mainstream life, where authors serve as brokers between two cultures. This is especially true of the two most personal genres, cookbooks and memoirs, where culture and family history are directly discussed. The writing of Arab-Canadian author Habeeb Salloum (1924-2019) combined both genres. His cookbook-memoirs fostered intercultural dialogue and combatted Orientalist stereotypes. This article examines how he practiced decolonization using three techniques: first, by assimilating into stereotypes of ‘Oriental’ culture; then, by retrieving Orientalist tropes and recasting them into positive aspects of Middle Eastern culture; and, finally, by attempting to position Arab minorities as allies of Indigenous communities. By revealing how Salloum succeeded, and sometimes failed, to push an anti-Orientalist agenda in his cookbooks, this study reinforces the central role that food and memoirs play in shaping the identities and experiences of individuals, communities, and nations.

Old imaginaries in a new frame: the politics of Bollywood’s ‘social problem films’ on Kashmir

ABSTRACT Newly emerging ‘social problem films’ on Kashmir appear as a shift from the conventional construction of Kashmir and Kashmiris in Bollywood. This study, through critical narrative analysis (CNA), examines the politics behind the representation of the ‘social problems’ of Kashmir in recent Hindi films. As the narratives of these films are marked by selectivity and arrangement of historical events, this study demonstrates that Orientalist tropes continue to figure in the films in new forms. It is demonstrated that the films, whose narratives are fully dedicated to the ‘inside’ of Kashmir, inflict layered violence against the actual political and historical realities of the region. While engaging with the colonial and post-colonial binary trope of people-versus-land, the films not only obfuscate the historical context, they vindicate an outside intervention by presenting an axiomatic image of the events, cut off from their socio-political and historical roots. The two films under scrutiny in this study are Haider (2014) and Laila Majnu (2018). The subject matter of both is Kashmiri youth, and far from unveiling the ‘youth problems’ of Kashmir, they end up constructing a fresh imagery in which the ‘psychotic’ behaviour and trauma of Kashmir’s ‘misguided’ youth is socially located and explained.

An exploration of poverty as a consumption object: voluntourist’s stories from an orphanage in Nepal

ABSTRACT This paper examines the understanding of poverty emerging in voluntourists’ accounts of their first-hand experiences of poverty alleviation. Based on the ethnography of an orphanage in Nepal, we show that despite voluntourists’ good intentions and even (self-)criticism of the volunteer tourism approach to poverty relief, their accounts tend to consolidate rather regressive ideas about poverty. We draw on postcolonial and post-development theory to illuminate specific ways in which the old Orientalist tropes and discourses of othering are perpetuated in this novel neoliberal form of travelling. We contribute to the critical work on voluntourism and market-based approaches to societal and environmental problems by focusing on poverty as an object of consumption. Such a conception emerges from how the voluntourists’ stories were shaped by and refracted through the structure of voluntourism and the logics of social media. Such refraction leads to systematic depoliticisation of global inequality and responses to poverty.

The Appendices of Empire: Why Writings from the Colonial Era Need to be Read in their Entirety

Among the many outcomes of the critique of Orientalism and the writings that emerged from the colonial era is the view that most, if not all, works that were published during the era of Empire are tainted by racial prejudice and Orientalist tropes and stereotypes of the non-Western Other. While this may be the case, this paper argues that there are still many reasons for postcolonial scholars to read such works today, from an informed and critical postcolonial perspective. This paper will look at three works by three colonial-era writers – Thomas Stamford Raffles’ The History of Java (1817); John Crawfurd’s Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava (1829); and Henry Keppel’s The Expedition to Borneo of the HMS Dido for the Suppression of Piracy (1846) – and show how, through a deep and critical reading of the texts, we can see the contradictions, ironies and uncertainties of the imperial project; and by so doing debunk the notion that Western colonialism in Southeast Asia was a linear, organised and systematic process entirely determined by the colonial powers themselves.

‘That still goes on, doesn't it, in their religion?’ British values, Islam and vernacular discourse

AbstractThis article explores ‘everyday’ or ‘vernacular’ conceptions of Muslims, Islam and their relationship to ‘British values’. Drawing on original data from focus groups in the East of England, it argues that the relationship is typically constructed around a series of binary pairings. Where Islam is held to be traditional, conservative, pious and outmoded, British values are seen as progressive, liberal, secular and modern. This opposition matters for three reasons. First, it is a contingent construction rather than reflection of realities; one that draws upon Orientalist tropes and militates against alternative ways of imagining this relationship. Second, it does important work at the vernacular level in explaining political dynamics, especially successful integration (because of British liberalism) and the failure thereof (because of Islam's traditionalism). Third, its predication on an essentialised claim of difference inflects even competing efforts to story the British values/Islam relationship which tend, we suggest, to reinforce the positioning of Muslims and their values as somehow beyond or external to Britishness.

Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

Fu Manchu, Hollywood Cinema, and Orientalism in the Work of Juan Marsé

Juan Marsé is one of Spanish literature’s most cinematic writers. Marsé himself has talked extensively in interviews about his passion for Hollywood cinema and the important role it played during his childhood in Barcelona. Critics such as Samuel Amell, Kwang-Hee Kim, and Jorge Marí have studied the influence of cinema on Marsé’s writing, both aesthetically and in terms of subject-matter. One aspect of Marsé’s relationship to twentieth-century cinema culture that has been overlooked by scholars, however, is his engagement with the medium’s Orientalism. Hollywood cinema has a long and sustained history of employing orientalist tropes and capitalizing on the widespread yellow peril discourse. An analysis of three of Marsé’s most critically-acclaimed novels, Si te dicen que caí (1973), El amante bilingue (1990), and El embrujo de Shanghai (1993), demonstrates how Marsé has recycled transnational tropes associated with the yellow peril, such as the figure of Fu Manchu, in ways that address concerns particular to the twentieth-century Spanish and Catalan contexts. Using Homay King’s theorization of orientalist mise-en-scène, this article argues that Marsé employs tropes borrowed from Hollywood cinema to highlight questions of identity, truth, and survival, themes that constitute an important through line in his writing.

“This barbaric terrorist organization”: Orientalism and Barack Obama’s language on ISIS

ABSTRACT This article explores US foreign policy discourse surrounding the rise of ISIS, from 2014 to 2016. Specifically, it asks how Obama constructed ISIS as a threatening Other at this time. This research responds to a gap in the literature concerning official Western discourses on ISIS violence, and partially fills this by tracing the formation of US foreign policy narratives and exploring how this drew from existing discourses and older Orientalist tropes. Conducting a discourse analysis of official statements, this paper shows how Obama modified his language to elevate the level of the threat in official discourse. It argues that he achieved this by drawing upon longstanding racialised and Orientalist archives of knowledge, effectively resituating the terrorist Other within a more markedly Orientalist discourse. Finally, the article concludes that by (re)producing the traditional Orientalist character of the barbarian as an existential threat to a Eurocentric idea of Western civilisation, Obama made possible an approach to intervention that prioritised air power, targeted assassinations and international cooperation to defend the “civilised” world. This had the effect of stigmatising Muslim communities who were left occupying a discursive space between the civilised West and the barbaric ISIS.