Oriental. Orientalist. Orientalism. The terms used to be simple with a meaning commonly agreed upon. From the perspective of the people who were charting new naval passages and drawing the maps, Asia was to the east. Hence, the use of the Latin term for it.
Logically a person who studied the Orient would be called an Orientalist, the study itself could be described as Orientalism. Things being as they were, it made sense. Then came that snivelling pseudo-intellectual twazek, Edward Said, and decided that he knew better and that everything would have to change because he wanted it to.
This leads me to, at long last, ask the central question — is it fair, or even relevant, to subject literature, scholarship, and art that was painted decades, if not centuries, before to a contemporary mindset?
This topic has come into my mind because I have just finished reading the Travels of Marco Polo. It was great fun. Perhaps the accuracy is dubious, but the stories are entertaining and the style quick and easy. The task for next week is to try to see if there was a vein “Orientalism”, using Said’s hijacking of the term, in it. It certainly did involve the East, the Orient. It was also told from the perspective of a Venetian from a different day and age. Was it world-class scholarship? Hardly. But does it deserve negative scrutiny, to be drug through the dirt because some prat writing in the 1970s decided that he wanted to kick up a fuss? Hardly.
It seems facile to accept Said’s perspective, to impose it on a different era. “Orientalist Painting” was simply an outgrowth of Romanticism. The fantastic, the improbable, the exaggerated in the paintings of the East were really not that much different from the depictions of the West at different times in its history — the romanticisation of the Mediaeval Era, of the countryside. More broadly, was the use of East Asian motifs in 18th and 19th century Europe, UK, and the Americas really any different than the Ch’ing Emperors living in a summer palace that blended traditional Chinese styles with the Baroque? Cultural interchange has always gone both ways, not always evenly.
Boadicea's Chariot 
What a man MP must have been. Leaving home at 17, to go east and only returning 25 years later! I’ve just watched a TV story about him and would like to read a book. Can you give me details, please?
Janus: I’m currently enrolled in an advanced history course, “Travellers to the Dragon Kingdom”. It’s about
travellers to China and their writings over the years.
Marco Polo’s work is extremely exaggerated. A lot of it is obviously false. Still, there are some great stories and it’s fairly easy to find a copy. It starts with a synopsis of his journey. The book consists of vignettes of various length and detail concerning how it was to travel, the cities he visited, the sites he saw, the people, the cultures, the religions, the myths, the histories of the places. He touches on Mongol court life during the era of Kublai Khan.
Thanks, Christopher. I’m sure a trip to Amazon will be the answer! 🙂
I’ve just done a quick Google on Said and he seems to have little to recommend him. I think Orientalism should keep its original definition. There’s one sentence of Said’s I agree with, however.
“So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists.”
Seems reasonable to me.