Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient(alism) Express
2000; Oxford University Press; Volume: 105; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2651411
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity
ResumoTHE INVITATION TO COMMENT AS A MEDIEVALIST on the impact of Edward Said's Orientalism twenty years after its publication reminded me of my exhilarating first encounter, when a colleague in eighteenth-century French history chose Said's book for our reading group. Orientalism introduced me to the different cultural and institutional ways in which Europeans constructed the Occident by assigning and hierarchizing boundaries between East and West. Orientalism unmasked the process whereby Europe fabricated itself on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe.2 Its critique of imaginary racialized geographies hooked me. Said's attention to the cultural politics of reprQsentation helped me, as a budding medieval economic historian, make sense of what I perceived to be sharp contradictions between archaeology and economic history during the early 1980s. Medieval archaeologists were then busy inverting the famous Pirenne Thesis, which credited the Islamic takeover of the Western Mediterranean in the seventh century with producing the conditions of isolation that guaranteed the emergence of Charlemagne and, indeed, Europe. Archaeologists, meanwhile, were uncov-
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