Date and time:
2018-12-17 10:00 - 2018-12-17 19:30
Location:
Vilniaus universiteto Azijos ir transkultūrinių studijų institutas
The days of naïve realism are definitely gone to never come back. Humanities in general were forced to recon with the deeper critical understanding of the effects that our preconceptions, biases, and naïve notions have on the studies of culture and humanity in general. When thinking of the changes that the discipline of the Middle Eastern studies has undergone in recent decades one can’t help but think of Edward Said and the effects that his studies, good or bad, have had on the discipline that has heretofore called itself Oriental studies.
The symposium invites scholars from the Arabic countries as well as local scholars to engage in what will hopefully be a fruitful dialogue on the history of orientalism as a discipline, and on the influence that Saidian critique has had and still has on the regional studies, specifically the Middle Easter and other non-Western regions.
Programme:
10 AM Ernestas Jančenkas The Philosophical Underpinnings of Saidian Orientalism: a Critique
There is no doubt that E. Said, although not a „professional orientalist“ himself has had a huge impact on the development of the discipline. This can be especially seen in the ways that various departments dedicated to the study of the Near East and Asia in general have dropped the name „Orientalism“ from its labels, albeit few remain adamant. On the other hand, its impact is deeper than just simple semantics, it has transformed the thinking about the mentioned regions and has given birth to new approaches towards the subject.
The presentation will seek to show what philosophical framework underlies Saidian critique of the orientalist disicpline and why it is relevant to discover the fundamental philosophical concepts that inform Saidian approach. As is well know E. Said was influenced by M. Foucault and his concept of savoir-pouvoir. However, both E. Said and M. Foucault are heavily indebted to F. Nietzsche and it is his thought that lies beneath the Saidian scepticism. The paper will offer a critique in the philosophical sense of the word as an attempt to uncover the epistemological limits of the Saidian approach.
10:30 AM Dr. Hilal al-Hajri Orientalist Debate: is there any escape?
Since Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), travel literature has been used in different epistemological realms to deconstruct West¬ern discourse and unveil the methods the Europeans have used to see and picture ‘other’ races in the East. Said, and many of his followers, consider Western travel writing on the Middle East as a not ‘historic¬ally innocent’ source, and, thus, they criticise Western travellers as being ‘imperialists’ and ‘racists’. Since the 1980s and with the ad-vent of postcolonial theory in the 1990s, this trend has culminated in a situation in which criticism of travel writing has become obsessed by absolute binaries such as ‘West’ and ‘East’, ‘European’ and ‘Other’, ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, etc.
This presentation offers a detailed review of some selected works which deal with European travelogues on the Middle East. Said and his followers, his opponents, and the scholars who took a middle way will be discussed and compared in terms of their approaches and criticism of some British, French, and American writers who wrote either factual travel accounts or pseudo-travelogues about the Middle East.
11 AM Dr Omar Abed Rabo History of Jerusalem beyond Orientalism and post Orientalism
This paper will deal with the image of Jerusalem in oriental studies and beyond. Since the middle of the 19th century until the end of the seventies during the twentieth century, all the studies on the city of Jerusalem focused on the study of the ancient city’s history and, archeology. These studies sought to visualize the ancient geographical and topographical landscape of Jerusalem in the way it was presented in the Bible. Various Anglo-Orientalist institutions, including the British PEF and SWP, the German Society for the Study of Palestine, the French missionary institutions, and the W.F. “Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem”, began intensive work in the city Jerusalem in order to prove that what was written in the Bible actually corresponds to Palestine and Jerusalem. As such, these institutions sought to present the “master narrative” about the history of the city in accordance with the theory and the goals of biblical colonial thought. These studies did not refer to the indigenous people of the city, and did not mention their presence in any way as if they did not exist.
Since the beginning of the eighties of the twentieth century, however, we began to see a new trend by orientalists, a study of different historical periods from the old periods until now. The studies that focused on the history of the city during the Islamic periods were few, but these studies were distinguished because of the scarcity of information available in Arab and Islamic sources about the city and its people. These studies presented new horizons for studying the history of the city during the Islamic periods, although there are disagreements about the explanations and conclusions of the scholars within the “post-Orientalism” trend, especially about the importance of the city and its status and, the cultural and religious value and the history of its social and cultural-religious life. Despite the existence of such studies in the contemporary period known as post-Orientalism, the overall view of the history of the city during the Islamic periods is still incomplete and intermittent.
11:30 AM Fabio Belafatti Chronopolitics and Orientalism. Time and the Construction of the Other in Western European narratives about Eastern Europe
The study of the applicability of Edward W. Said’s critique of Orientalism to the representation of Eastern Europe in Western European and American media has received a major boost from the outbreak of the political crisis in Ukraine and the Russian invasion of its eastern provinces. While several scholars, such as Roman Horbyk, Mykola Ryabchuk and, more recently, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa and Yuliya Yurchuk have pointed at the existing similarities between narratives about Ukraine and the colonial discourse at the core of Orientalism, most of them have pointed at the importance of constructed concepts such as that of Eastern European passivity and lack of agency. The purpose of this presentation is to focus on another aspect of Orientalist narratives applied to Eastern Europe, namely the construction of the image of an Eastern European “Other” opposed to a Western and Russian “us” using the idea of ideological radicalism and its derivation from the concept of backwardness.
I argue that just as modern Orientalist narratives described by Said underline the importance of threatening ideologies within the Muslim world to construct the idea of an Islamic menace that requires Western intervention to be controlled, similar narratives applied to Eastern Europe construct it as a land dominated by fanatical, irrational nationalism. To achieve this result, the concept of Time is frequently used, underlining the supposed different position of Western and Eastern Europe along a line of uni-directional progress in which Western Europe becomes the positive term of comparison. By looking at the way memory policies and failures to “come to terms with one’s past” in the two halves of the Old Continent are narrated in Western European media, I seek to demonstrate that the narrative about Eastern Europe centres around a chronopolitical usage of facts, interpretations, selections of meaning and, most importantly, spurious and skewed comparisons that combine factually-accurate observations with exaggerations and essentialist views of the cultures of the region. Chronopolitics therefore becomes a tool to orientalise half of the Continent and construct an “us VS them” dichotomy that is then used in geopolitically-deterministic narratives to legitimize the imposition of external power onto Eastern Europe.
12 AM Šarūnas Rinkevičius Occidentalism as a reverse orientalism
Occidentalist ideas in their modern sense were firstly developed by Russian Slavophile philosophers in the 19th century as a critical approach to the Western influence with the quest for the internal ways of development that laterly spread further. Although it is still popular to consider occidentalism as a form of direct response to orientalism, this is rather a natural phenomenon that coexists with the other ideas in a case of quest for identity in a rapidly changing political, economical and social conditions.
12:30 AM Q&A (Roundtable discussion)
18 PM Lecture by Dr. Omar Abed Rabo Architectural heritage during the period of Umayyad and Fatimid dynasties (8th – 10th centuries) in Jerusalem
Historian Dr. Omar Abed Rabo from the Bethlehem University invites all who are interested in the early Islamic civilization in Jerusalem to the lecture. The lecture will be give an overview of the most important architectural monuments of Jerusalem dating from the 8th-10th centuries.