Orientalism

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Orientalism names a practice and a problem that has shaped Western art, literature, and scholarship for centuries. In art history and cultural studies, it describes the imitation or depiction of aspects of the Eastern world by writers, designers, and artists from the Western world. But in 1978, a scholar named Edward Said turned that word into something else entirely. His book, also called Orientalism, argued that the West had not simply depicted the East. It had fabricated it. Said's thesis was pointed: Western society had essentialized Asian and North African cultures as static and undeveloped, projecting a vision of the Orient that could be studied, reproduced, and controlled in the service of imperial power. Implicit in that fabrication, Said wrote, was the idea that Western society is developed, rational, flexible, and superior. What does it mean to represent another culture entirely on your own terms? Why did so many European painters, composers, architects, and novelists find the East so irresistible? And what happens when that imaginative power is exercised at the same moment a political empire is being built? Those are the questions at the heart of this story.

• 2. The Word Itself

  ›

  The word "orient" entered English from the Middle French orient, which in turn came from the Latin oriēns, meaning the rising sun, the east, the sky from which the sun comes. Geoffrey Chaucer used it in 1375 in "The Monk's Tale," writing of conquerors who had taken "many regnes grete / In the orient, with many a fair citee." There, the orient meant countries east of the Mediterranean and southern Europe. By 1952, when Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan wrote of "the awakening of the Orient under the impact of Western ideas" in his book In Place of Fear, the term had expanded to include East Asia. The word carried with it a built-in opposition: orient versus occident, East versus West. That opposition was not just geographical. It was loaded with judgments about which side was developing and which was standing still. Said would later argue that this binary was never a neutral description of the world. It was a framework designed to position the West as the knowing subject and the East as the object to be known.

• 3. Painters and Their Orient

  ›

  Orientalist painting was, by the 19th century, a recognized specialty within European academic art, particularly in France. Artists were called Orientalists, a term that carried social disdain in some quarters. The French art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary made dismissive use of the label. Despite that, the French Society of Orientalist Painters was founded in 1893, with Jean-Léon Gérôme as its honorary president. Historians tend to divide the painters into two camps: realists who painted what they actually observed, such as Gustav Bauernfeint, and those who invented Oriental scenes without ever leaving their studios. Eugène Delacroix, born in 1798, and Gérôme, born in 1824, are generally considered the leading figures of the movement. Delacroix's path into the subject followed Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and Syria from 1798 to 1801, which had fired enormous public curiosity about the region. His first great success, The Massacre at Chios in 1824, was painted before he had visited the East at all. When he finally traveled to Algeria and Morocco in 1832 as part of a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco, he was struck by what he saw. He compared the North African way of life to that of the Ancient Romans and continued painting subjects from that trip for the rest of his career. He was frustrated by the difficulty of gaining access to women as subjects but did apparently manage to enter a harem to sketch what became Women of Algiers, a work he later credited with unusual authenticity. Gérôme's work moved in a different direction. His exhibition of For Sale; Slaves at Cairo at the Royal Academy in London in 1871 was widely found offensive, criticized for cruelty and for representing what one commentator called "fleshiness for its own sake." He was later described as the precursor of a group of painters whose works were often frankly salacious, featuring scenes in harems, public baths, and slave auctions, and credited with establishing what one scholar called "the equation of Orientalism with the nude in pornographic mode." John Frederick Lewis occupied a different position entirely. He lived for several years in a traditional mansion in Cairo and produced highly detailed paintings of Middle Eastern life. His wife modeled for several of his harem scenes, which imagined, as one account put it, "the harem as a place of almost English domesticity." He never painted a nude. His careful representation of Islamic architecture, furnishings, and costumes set new standards of realism and influenced other artists, including Gérôme in his later work.

• 4. Britain, Religion, and Realism

  ›

  British Orientalist painting grew from different roots than its French counterpart. Where French Orientalism was entangled with military conquest and the market for nude figures, British interest was shaped more by religion. Sir David Wilkie was 55 years old when he traveled to Istanbul and Jerusalem in 1840 hoping to find authentic settings for Biblical subjects. He believed that painting needed what he called "a Martin Luther" to sweep away what he described as the abuses of traditional Christian iconography. He died off Gibraltar on the return voyage before he could complete more than studies. Other artists carried that Protestant impulse forward. William Holman Hunt, a Pre-Raphaelite, produced major paintings of Biblical subjects drawing on his Middle Eastern travels, including The Scapegoat in 1856, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple in 1860, and The Shadow of Death in 1871. His 1854-61 work A Street Scene in Cairo; The Lantern-Maker's Courtship depicts a young man feeling his fiancée's face through her veil, with a Western figure visible in the background. It was a rare instance of a clearly contemporary scene in British Orientalist art, which otherwise tended toward historical distance. Scholar Rana Kabbani argued that while French and British Orientalist painting differed in style, with French work appearing more sensual and sexually explicit, the difference was not one of substance. Both traditions, she suggested, were driven by the same "strains of fascination and repulsion." The iconography of what is described as the odalisque, the Oriental sex slave offered to the viewer's gaze, was identified as almost entirely French in origin, though taken up with enthusiasm by Italian and other European painters.

• 5. Architecture Borrows the East

  ›

  The borrowing was not confined to canvas. European architects and designers absorbed Eastern forms across several centuries, producing distinct stylistic waves. Turquerie, the fashion for Turkish styles in European decorative arts and costume, began as early as the late 15th century and continued until at least the 18th. Venice, the traditional trading partner of the Ottomans, was its earliest center. France became more prominent in the 18th century. Chinoiserie took a different path. The term covers the fashion for Chinese themes in Western European decoration, beginning in the late 17th century and peaking in the Rococo period, roughly from 1740 to 1770. Tin-glazed pottery made at Delft adopted blue and white designs from genuine Ming-era porcelain in the early 17th century. Craftsmen at Meissen and other centers of true porcelain imitated Chinese shapes for dishes, vases, and teawares. Thomas Chippendale's mahogany tea tables and china cabinets were embellished with fretwork glazing and railings from roughly 1753 to 1770. Kew Gardens has a magnificent Great Pagoda designed by William Chambers. The Indo-Saracenic Revival, drawing on the architecture of the Indian subcontinent, produced one of its earliest examples in the facade of Guildhall in London, constructed from 1788 to 1789. It gained momentum after William Hodges and William and Thomas Daniell published their views of India from around 1795. In 1848, the showman Phineas Taylor Barnum built an Iranistan mansion in what he understood as Mogul style, sparking the construction of what were called Oriental Villas in America. From about 1805, railroad stations and pumping stations across Europe and America were decorated with Moorish details. After 1860, Japonism, sparked by the import of ukiyo-e prints, reshaped western decorative arts. Claude Monet and Edgar Degas were influenced by Japanese style. The California architects Greene and Greene drew on Japanese elements in their design of the Gamble House. Egyptian Revival architecture became popular in the early and mid-19th century, and in the 1920s it was a common design style for American movie theaters, beginning with Grauman's Egyptian Theatre, built in 1922.

• 6. Said's Argument

  ›

  Edward Said's Orientalism, published in 1978, became one of the most influential books in the humanities of its era. Said was a cultural critic, and his argument drew on two earlier thinkers: Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony, and Michel Foucault's theorization of discourse, meaning the relationship between knowledge and power. Said applied those frameworks to the scholarly tradition of Oriental studies and found it rotten at its foundations. He argued that the subject of learned Orientalists was not, as they claimed, the East itself. It was, as he put it, "the East made known, and therefore less fearsome, to the Western reading public." He famously described this arrangement in theatrical terms: "The idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined." He also accused specific scholars of perpetuating this tradition of outsider-interpretation, naming Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami by name as contemporary figures who had carried the bias forward. The book became a foundational text of postcolonial cultural studies. Said himself acknowledged that his analyses focused on Orientalism in European literature, especially French literature, and did not extend to visual art or Orientalist painting. The art historian Linda Nochlin later applied Said's methods to art, with what the source describes as "uneven results." Said's framework also influenced thinking about what scholars later called techno-Orientalism and postmodern Orientalism, tracking how industry and technology had shaped outsider-interpretations of the East in the contemporary period. By 2002, the scale of engagement with Said's argument within the Islamic world was visible in one striking estimate: in Saudi Arabia alone, approximately 200 books and 2,000 articles discussing Orientalism had been written by local or foreign scholars.

• 7. Music, Ballet, and the Stage East

  ›

  Orientalism in the performing arts followed its own logic. In music, the alla Turca style appeared across multiple composers, including Mozart and Beethoven. The musicologist Richard Taruskin identified a particular strain of Orientalism in 19th-century Russian music: "the East as a sign or metaphor, as imaginary geography, as historical fiction, as the reduced and totalized other against which we construct our (not less reduced and totalized) sense of ourselves." The group of Russian composers known as "The Five" made Orientalism a deliberate stylistic tool, using eastern themes and harmonies to distinguish their music from the German symphonism associated with Anton Rubinstein. Works in this vein included Balakirev's Islamey, Borodin's Prince Igor, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. Taruskin characterized the musical markers of this Orientalism as melodies full of close ornaments and melismas, chromatic accompanying lines, and drone bass, traits used by Glinka, Balakirev, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyapunov, and Rachmaninov. He was candid about what these markers were meant to evoke: a seductive passivity associated with what Russian composers imagined as the East. Taruskin also noted that Russian composers felt an ambivalence about this theme that French and German composers did not. Russia was a contiguous empire where Europeans lived alongside people they called Orientals, and intermarried with them far more than other colonial powers did. Ballet was equally saturated with Eastern imagery. Le Corsaire, loosely based on a poem by Lord Byron, premiered in 1856 at the Paris Opera and was re-choreographed for the Maryinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg by Marius Petipa in 1899. Its plot involves a pirate, a slave girl, a bazaar, and a pasha's harem. Petipa's La Bayadère in 1877, based on Kalidasa's play Sakuntala, used vaguely Indian costuming and incorporated Indian-inspired hand gestures into classical ballet, along with a Hindu Dance motivated by the Kathak form. Michel Fokine's Sheherazade in 1910, danced to Rimsky-Korsakov's score, involved a shah's wife, a Golden Slave originally played by Vaslav Nijinsky, and an orgy in an Oriental harem. It was loosely drawn from stories in One Thousand and One Nights. Ruth St Denis, one of the pioneers of modern dance in America, built her career on Orientalist material she drew not from lived experience but from photographs, books, and museum visits in Europe. Her Indian program in 1906 included Radha and The Cobras. Her 1923 work Ishtar of the Seven Gates drew on Babylonian myth. Major ballet companies continue to stage Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Sheherazade today, and the stereotypical arm positions associated with "Oriental" dance in The Nutcracker, including the ninety-degree arm bend with index fingers pointed upward in the Chinese dance, remain in productions such as the 2010 American Ballet Theatre staging.

• 8. The Pushback and the Mirror

  ›

  Said's argument did not go unchallenged. Critics pointed out that he had, in the process of attacking Western essentialism, arguably essentialized the West itself, creating a homogenous image of Europe and America that flattened internal disagreements and contradictions. Edward Said was accused of Occidentalizing the West in his critique of Orientalism. His own framework acknowledged a complication: Germany, which Said originally said lacked a politically motivated Orientalism because its colonial empire did not expand in the same regions as France and Britain, later attracted a more nuanced assessment. Said admitted that German scholars shared with Anglo-French Orientalism "a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient," while also acknowledging that the German Orient was "almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical, Orient." Suzanne L. Marchand described German scholars as the "pace-setters" in Oriental studies. Robert Irwin wrote that until the Second World War, German dominance of Orientalism was practically unchallenged. Scholars in East-Central and Eastern Europe have applied Said's analytical tools to their own situation, examining how Western cultural discourses depicted their own societies as backward during the 19th century and through the Soviet period. Researchers Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes introduced the term "re-orientalism" to describe how Eastern self-representation often works through Western reference points, simultaneously challenging and reinforcing Orientalist frameworks. The concept of Occidenterie, meaning the material fascination with Western objects found among 18th-century Qing emperors in China, offers a parallel to Europe's own chinoiserie. The emperor's architectural project of Xiyang Lou was its most visible expression, but Occidenterie objects were domestically produced and available across a wide spectrum of Chinese society. Said's work has also been traced into scholarship on Greece and Germany during the European sovereign debt crisis, where researchers found a volatile mixture of fascination, condescension, and admiration that reproduced, in a European setting, the same dynamics Said had identified between West and East.