Orientalism and World History

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Orientalism and World History: Representing Middle Eastern Nationalism and Islamism in the Twentieth Century By Edmund Burke, III University of California, Santa Cruz Theory & Society , 27:4 (August 1998), 589-607 "The problem with Europe is that it has forgotten its history, most of which takes place outside its borders." -Salman Rushdie Framing the Present Time (I) This is a essay about framing, about contextualization. It seeks to situate the political and cultural transitions the modern Middle East has undergone in this century in their world historical contexts, the better to help us understand the meanings of the present shift to Islamist forms of politics in the region. It is my contention that scholars have misunderstood the world historical significance of the emergence of nationalism in the area, that they have misconstrued its relationship to orientalism and to the European enlightenment more generally, and (as a result) largely misunderstood the nature of the Islamist challenge. In many ways my reflections here spring from a dissatisfaction with the inadequacies (both epistemological and world historical) of the ways in which some critics of orientalism have located modernity. First, some background. The independence movements of the Middle East and North Africa--especially the Algerian revolution--provoked a debate about orientalist knowledge in which the interventions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon were crucial. For Fanon, the anti-colonial struggle was also a cultural struggle with liberation as its goal. The publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) recast the terms of the debate. Following Michel Foucault, Said portrayed orientalism as not just an academic discipline, but as an ideological discourse inextricably involved with European power. In the debate that followed, neither Said nor his critics were always
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