Eugene Delacroix painted this image in 1834. It is one of the most famous Orientalist images in French art, and is now the Louvre in Paris.

What is going on in the picture? Who is the intended viewer?

We’ve talked, and you’ve read about, “Orientalism” as a category in the past days. On Thursday we’ll be working through what this term really means, and talking about its usefulness in understanding different moments in French history, as well perhaps as our own. To help with this, here is an excerpt from Edward Said’s classic book Orientalism (1979), which had a major impact on scholarship in a range of fields in the past decades. Get ready — the definition is rather long and complicated!

Here is how Said defines “Orientalism” on p. 12:

. . . Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographic distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power culture (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power more (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do).

Next Tuesday, we will have the visit of two members of the artistic team involved with the Duke Performances presentation of Alonso King LINES Ballet. I urge you to get tickets to the show, which promises to be remarkable. (Student tickets are $5).

Please Note: Contrary to what is listed on the syllabus, the visit will actually take place in our regular classroom, 326 Allen Building.

Our class visitors will be Robert Rosenwasser, LINES Ballet’s Associate Artistic Director and Selby Schwartz, LINES Ballet’s Artistic Project Manager. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in Comparative Literature (Italian/French), and a Joint Ph.D. in Medieval Studies. She has been a Lecturer at UC Berkeley, a LEAP Mentor at St. Mary’s College of California, and the Artistic Manager of LINES Ballet; of late she has been in Rome, writing about drag & dance.

Selby Schwartz has recommended, along with the reading, a brief French video on the Alonso King version of the ballet available here.

In our class, we will hear about the way in which they have studied and adapted the famous Ballet Russe version of Scheherazade, considered perhaps the greatest Orientalist spectacle of its day in France, in this 21st century version.

You can read background about Schererezade as a character in the 1001 Nights and in various other works of art and literature here.

Additional readings are on Blackboard.

Please post a comment or question you would like to pose to our visitors here by 8 p.m. next Monday.