French Orientalism: Culture, Politics, and the Imagined Other (review)

Edward Said offers multiple time frames for the phenomenon of ‘orientalism’; indeed, this is one of the oddities of his landmark 1978 essay. However, the position adopted throughout the present edited volume is that Said situates the starting point of orientalism specifically with the Description de l’Égypte (pp. 2, 106, etc.). As a result, the editors feel the need to argue the case for the existence of an earlier, and significantly different, orientalism; certainly, the volume’s strengths lie largely in its contributions to the study of pre-nineteenth-century orientalism. The section on gender, and within it Desmond Hosford’s own chapter on Cleopatra in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French tragedy, seeks to suggest ways of approaching earlier orientalism that nuance Said’s own approach (although it seems odd to argue that the oriental woman as femme fatale is a figure that does not appear in the nineteenth century too). As is often the case with edited volumes linked by a common theme, there is some imbalance between chapters offering studies of a well-defined literary corpus, broad-ranging chapters such as that of Claudia Gyss on the iconography of ‘Egyptomania’, and cultural study chapters based in part on lengthy quotations from what appears to be the author’s own travelogue (pp. 72–74). Nevertheless, the volume’s overall framework provides a degree of cohesion not always found in edited collections: not only is there a general Introduction, but also separate introductions to the three sections, each with its own, now traditional, gerund-as-title — ‘Gendering the Orient’, ‘Imagining the Orient’, and ‘Reversing the Gaze’. In addition, it is clear that the editors have attempted to give theoretical unity to their overall approach, with recurrent references to Said, as well as some (slightly abrupt) references to a single passage taken from Kristeva’s theory of abjection (pp. 2, 50, 228). Some chapters by non-native English speakers, such as those by Monica Katiboğlu on Loti and Chetro De Carolis on Montesquieu, both of them perceptive pieces, would nevertheless have benefited from more attentive copy-editing, or indeed a sharper eye for content — one imagines that Flaubert might have taken a wry pleasure in being seen as a ‘Romantic writer’ (p. 128), and Montesquieu would have been surprised to find Usbek promoted to the rank of ‘sultan’ (pp. 190, 192). Quotations from French works are given in English, which can be inadvertently entertaining, such as when ‘[s]’asseoir en tailleur’ is rendered as ‘sitting as a tailor’ (p. 214). Despite these flaws, the volume offers several pertinent contributions to ongoing debates about approaches to orientalism since 1978.