Status Updates From Orientalismus

“If this stimulates a new kind of dealing with the Orient, indeed it it eliminates the "Orient" and "Occident" altogether, then we shall have advanced a little in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the "unlearning" of "the inherent dominative mode.”

reinforced stereotypes, media

-> callback Walter Benjamin?

Gramsci mentioned! (again)

Overview

“there has never been […] an ‘idea’ of the Orient.”

“as early as Aeschylus's play The Persians the Orient is transformed from a very far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar”

strategic location, strategic formation

German oriental scholarship

“[…] Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field […] [but] a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ […]”