From Orientalism to Postcolonialism

This book uses a historical and theoretical focus to examine the key of issues of the Enlightenment, Orientalism, concepts of identity and difference, and the contours of different modernities in relation to both local and global shaping forces, including the spread of capitalism. The contributors present eight in-depth studies and a substantial theoretical introduction, utilizing primary and secondary sources in Turkish, Farsi, Chinese, not to mention English, French and German in the effort to engage materials and cultural perspectives from diverse regions. It provides a critical attempt to think through the potentialities and limitations of area-studies and ‘civilizational’ approaches to the production of knowledge about the modern world, and the often obscured relationship between the fragment and the whole, or the particular and universal. The book is an intervention in one of the most fundamental debates confronting the social science and humanities, namely how to understand global and local historical processes as interconnected developments affecting human actors.From Orientalism to Postcolonialism will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies and Asian studies and Middle Eastern studies.

"From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia, Europe and the Lineages of Difference offers a series of rich, insightful, and probing reflections on the contemporary state of postcolonial theory. Taken as a whole, the book is a fitting homage to Foucault’s great insight concerning the inherently distortional nature of all classification. The essays collected here urge us to confront the ways in which our most trusted ideational schemes are predisposed toward arbitrary and prejudicial modes of conceptualizing otherness and difference. This pathbreaking anthology is must-read for scholars working in the humanities and social sciences" - Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor of History, The Graduate Center, City University of New York"Exposing the scandalous persistence of Orientalism in the human sciences, this volume shows how postcolonialism institutionalizes the very formation it claims to critique. Going beyond the cultural-academic and political-administrative co-ordinates of Orientalism as delineated by Edward Said, the contributors demonstrate how Orientalism endures through Occidentalism, Orientalism-in-reverse, and self-Orientalisation." Srinivas Aravamudan, Dean of Humanities and Professor of English, Duke University