Word: orientalist
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...Palestinians, Tarr assumes, are masking violent motives with talk of justice, and only the "intelligent" West can understand their insidious intentions. In this, he promotes the Orientalist attitudes of Western people who think they know the wishes and thoughts of the Arabs better than they do themselves...
...match for him; no eyes, no throat, no groin safe from an assault, swift and agonizing") and the conspiratorial plotting are stock Ludlum. So is the hero, Jason Bourne. Readers of The Bourne Identity (1980) will recognize him as the cover name for David Webb, the American Orientalist who was used to lure Carlos, the international terrorist known as the Jackal...
Said notes in the foreward that one could better describe Schwab as an "Oreinteur" than an "Orientalist," Indeed Schwab's intimate style maintains a respectful appreciation for his subject, the Orient, of which he remarked himself. "Perhaps no single other term has been so loaded with emotion, even passion" in the history of western consciousness. His philosophical critique not only traces changing perceptions of the Orient, the Other, but in the process goes to the roots of western intellectual history to illuminate changes in the Occidental self-image as well...
Capitalizing on the rage for things Oriental that had also seized writers such as Pierre Loti and Gustave Flaubert and scholars like Sir Richard Burton, the Orientalist artists vied with one another in seeking out exotica. Harems aside, the subjects that most mesmerized them were slave markets, carpet bazaars, whirling dervishes, Arab stallions, caravans of caparisoned camels and wind-whipped burnooses of Bedouins on the sands of the Sahara. "There is a fortune to be made for painters in Cairo," noted William Makepeace Thackeray on a visit to Egypt in 1844. "I never saw such a variety of architecture...
...Forster had predicted, Orientalist painting in its academic manifestations fell into disrepute in this century, though a few of its pictorial motifs continued to exert a lively influence on some modern painters. That the movement's appeal can be readily reactivated, however, is attested by "The Orientalists," an opulent exhibition of 102 paintings currently on view at Washington's National Gallery. The phenomenal attendance at the show-124,000 people since July 1-indicates that the paintings are still as much fun to look at as they are instructive to contemplate. And in the case of the great...