Orientalism's Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (review)

This wide-ranging collection of essays in visual culture is a most welcome contribution to the field of postcolonial studies, brilliantly inserting the often overlooked category of the visual into the analysis of colonial and imperial power relations. Focusing on Orientalism, both as content and as a field of postcolonial analysis, the book provides a surprisingly large number of diverse examples that will fascinate specialists in several fields as well as the general reader. Deriving from a conference linked to an exhibition of Orientalist art, the book avoids the usual pitfalls of such volumes – the reader never feels like an afterthought who missed the real event. Instead, the book sets out to reconsider Orientalism not just by concentrating on the internal divisions of Western Orientalist discourse (now increasingly recognised, but valuably explored in some of the articles here) but by also by emphasising the agency of the Orient and of those produced as ‘Oriental’ in the construction and contestation of Orientalist images and knowledges. Attending to cross-cultural exchanges that reveal that Orientalism was ‘contested not only from a postcolonial vantage point, but also at its historical moment of inception’ (2), the contributors utilise a number of different methodologies (ranging from materialist historical analysis to deconstruction) to cover examples (of painting, drawing, architecture, photography, literature) from the early nineteenth to late twentieth centuries in geographies crossing Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

The book has two main aims both signalled by its emphasis on Orientalism’s interlocutors: firstly, to highlight the widespread take up of Orientalism (in subject and technique) by ‘indigenous’ populations, and, secondly, to attend to oppositional or marginal views and voices within Western Orientalism. In responding to both these challenges a number of themes emerge across the articles in the collection; there is an attention to questions of audience and reception; an assessment of space, both ideological and architectural; a reconsideration of fantasy, often seen as key to Western Orientalism; a detailed evaluation of the shifting ideological significance of technique; and an analysis of the role of imperialism and Orientalism in the construction of counter-cultural Western subjectivities.

Roger Benjamin’s analysis of the very different oeuvre of two North African artists demonstrates how their take up of Western pictorial conventions poses problems of interpretation then and now. Both Azouaou Mammeri’s more apparently emulative perspectival landscapes and Mohammed Racim’s indigenising “neo-traditionalist” adaptations of Persian miniatures were popular with the French in Algeria and in Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century. But where the less overt signals of resistance that Benjamin suggests can be read into Mammeri’s choice of subject left them problematically hovering on the edge of co-option, Racim’s deliberately hybridised pictures of heroicized Corsairs have continued to be popular with Algerian nationalists as a desirable image of an imagined pre-colonial past. To see beyond the “apparent visual equivalency” to French style that pushed Mammeri out of postcolonial fashion, Benjamin directs us to ‘extravisual’ questions of the context of production and of reception’ (54), a corrective that allows us to see Mammeri’s gaze on the North African landscape as one that rather than being touristic or colonial was ‘participatory, awash with specific associations and cultural memories’ (57). This nuanced decoding of reception means that the ostensibly harder to co-opt hybridity of Racim’s counter-narratives is also problematised, since his contemporary French audience were able to find much to praise.

The contradictions of interpretation are also highlighted in Mark Crinson’s reading of mosques in Britain. Challenging sociologically essentialist definitions of “Muslim space,” he demonstrates the historically shifting and contingent nature of diaspora mosques where struggles over design and use exist both between Muslims and sometimes hostile host communities and within the community of believers (whose diverse points of origin and theological traditions also necessitate a variety of spatial relations and design compromises). When prime examples of Western-designed Victorian Orientalist mosques can be adopted by diaspora Muslims and used today with no change...