Debating Orientalism - Hardcover

Bernard, Anna; Attwell, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230303528 ISBN 13: 9780230303522

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Synopsis

To many, Edward Said's seminal 1978 work Orientalism is an enduring touchstone, a founding text of the field of postcolonial studies and a book that continues to influence debates in literary and cultural studies, Middle Eastern Studies, anthropology, art history, history and politics. To others, however, Orientalism has serious failings, not least in blaming the wrong people - namely, Orientalists - for the crimes of European imperialism. Debating Orientalism addresses the book's contemporary relevance without lionizing or demonizing its author. Bridging the gap between intellectual history and political engagement, the twelve contributors to this volume interrogate Orientalism's legacy with a view to moving the debate about this text beyond the manichean limitations within which it has all too often been imprisoned. Debating Orientalism seeks to consider Orientalism's implications with a little less feeling, though no less commitment to understanding the value and political effects of engaged scholarship.

About this title

Review:

"Debating Orientalism offers a useful balance between the more historiographical and the more theoretical interventions, and gives an excellent sense of the multiple disciplinary frameworks Said's book invokes and incites. The chapters talk back to each other in intriguing ways, indeed at points argue categorically against each other, giving a sense of immediacy and debate." - Dr. Alex Padamsee, University of Kent, UK

About the Author:

Ziad Elmarsafy is Reader in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. He is the author of The Enlightenment Qur'an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oneworld, 2009) and Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

Anna Bernard is Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at King's College London, UK. Her publications include essays on Israel/Palestine and 'third-world literature,' the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in metropolitan popular culture, and transnational genres of partition literature. She is completing a book on contemporary Palestinian and Israeli world writing.
David Attwell is Professor of English at the University of York, UK, though South African by birth. He has published widely on J.M. Coetzee. His work on South African literature includes Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (2006), and The Cambridge History of South African Literature, co-edited with Derek Attridge (2012).

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0230303528
• ISBN 13: 9780230303522
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 290
• Editor: Elmarsafy Z.