L'Orient des femmes by Pauline Lavagne-d'Ortigue (review)
2005; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 100; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mlr.2005.0306
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Tópico(s)Islamic Studies and History
ResumoMLR, 100.4, 2005 1075 that someone has lived beyond the point when they should have died?' is complicated by the sense that someone who lives on may do so having, as it were, gone through death, making their existence now posthumous. Wilson's study does not take on the question of what it means to feel that death has already been inside the person's life, and yet the personal anecdote with which she starts might have given her the clue. Because she treats death and life as opposites, the book misses out on contemporary discussion of trauma and of the literature of testimony, which witnesses to the expe? rience of having been, as it were, through death; misses discussion of Freud's Beyond thePleasure Principle (Wilson shows herself well aware of Freud, but not of this most relevant text), and discussion of other texts which would show that the topic was not one that could be limited to tragedy?that would, in fact help her redefine tragedy. What about overliving and being in a state of madness? Buchner's Lenz finishes with madness as 'living on': 'So lebte er hin . . .'. University of Hong Kong Jeremy Tambling L'Orient des femmes. Ed. by Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain and Pauline Lavagne -d'Ortigue. Paris: ENS Editions. 2002. 320 pp. ?29. ISBN 2-90212693 -x. The publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 triggered what is now over a quarter of a century's worth of critical replies. While Aijaz Ahmad explored, in his In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1992), what he saw as Said's blind spots regarding class, a number of other responses have focused on the potential contribution of feminist perspectives to a requestioning of the Oriental ist field: e.g. IrvinC. Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse (London: Verso, 1999), and Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The collection of studies constituting L'Orient desfemmes represents a wide-ranging contribution to these reflections on gender and intercultural representation. The re? jection in its title of the more conventional 'femmes d'Orient' emphasizes both this active foregrounding of femininity in matters of representation and the more general problematization of Orientalism and ownership to which this shiftof focus leads. Al? though Said's work is cited in only a minority of the chapters, the volume as a whole affirmsmany of his assumptions, while at the same time texturing and attenuating the implications of his scholarly understandings of 'the Orient'. As such, it represents a relatively rare French-language engagement with Orientalism (Said's study was translated into French in 1980), although it should be noted that several contributors conversant with recent postcolonial debates (such as Janet Starkey, in her excellent study of women travellers in the Egyptian desert, or Farish Noor, in her challenging analysis of Anna Leonowens and Isabella Bird) are based in institutions outside France. The volume is made up of papers presented at a 1999 conference organized by the Anglorient research group in Marne-la-Vallee. The cultural, chronological, geo? graphical, and generic spread of material addressed is wide, and the methodological approaches to this corpus are suitably eclectic, with the authors drawing on a diverse range of secondary materials. The structuring of contributions into four loosely de? fined sections?on visual aesthetics, literary representations, women and travel, and the theorization of Orientalism from a gendered perspective?nevertheless creates connections between the studies, suggesting some marked continuities and discontinuities : it is perhaps not surprising, for instance, to see recurrent references to the Thousand and One Nights, but the very differentcontexts in which this text emerges reveal the surprising ways in which it has travelled (to emerge most recently,as Dounia Abourachid explains here, in the equivalent of contemporary Arabie pop). 1076 Reviews Although forthe more general reader it is perhaps the two concluding sections that will be of most interest, given their emphasis on aspects of Orientalist critique that continue to attract sustained interest, the opening sets ofessays are remarkable in their attention to a rich body of Persian art (the book is well illustrated, with twenty...
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