26 APRIL 2008
Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

 

‘Out of this [opposition between the West and the Orient] comes a restricted number of typical encapsulations: the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation. These are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between the East and the West’
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978:58)

 


a painting by Ingres on the left and a photograph by Ahmed on the right
Left: Odalisque with a Slave, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, oil on canvas, 1839-1840, Harvard University Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Bequest of Grenwill L. Winthrop, 1943.251, Katya Kallsen ©, President and Fellows of Harvard College, Right: Um Ahmed, July 5, 2006, by Emilio Morenatti, PA Photo

The thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism comes as a suitable opportunity to consider again the Western vision of the Orient. For Said, developing the foucauldian concept of power/knowledge, the West produced and codified knowledge that justified relationships of power, and argument he developed further in Culture and Imperialism (1993). In the current climate of conflicts and the disastrous effects of the West’s new ‘crusade’ (or ‘war on terror’), Said’s central question, ‘how can we know and respect the Other’, becomes more and more pressing.

This one-day conference will focus on the impact of Said’s legacy to analyse visual culture as a crucial component of Orientalism’s (and more generally imperialism’s) political self-justification, in the discursive construction of the Orient.  Not only exploring the framework through which ‘otherness’ is constructed and re-presented, we wish to examine how, by ‘clothing in art’ the prejudices of colonial and post-colonial discourses, the fundamental motives of imperialism can be masked.

We welcome papers stemming from the nineteenth century, when imperialism was produced by the development of racial thinking and the rise of European nationalism, to the present period. Addressing the vision of a ‘plural’ West, we invite speakers to take up the issues raised by both obvious and surprising ‘Others’, from the indolent and submissive odalisque to the fierce and dehumanised suicide bomber.

Topics for discussion may include (but are not limited to):

  • Display, memory and discourses of power
  • Nationalism and Identity thinking; Self/Other; Subject/Object
  • Notions of progress and primitivism
  • The Subaltern’s voice and cross-representation
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Postcolonial theory: a crisis?
  • Edward Said and his critiques
  • Stereotypes and the Oriental Myth.

 

Keynote Speakers: TBC

Abstracts of no more than 250 words, for 20 minutes presentations, from academics and postgraduate students, should be submitted to both conference organisers by 20 December 2007:
Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen (aabykayeva@hotmail.com)

Melanie Vandenbrouck (melanie.vandenbrouck@courtauld.ac.uk