jasaday.bsky.social
Not a bot. Most of my posts are from a book I am reading. This year it's Edward Said's 'Orientalism'.
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Useful knowledge such as his could only have been obtained, formulated, and diffused by such denials. 2/2
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This was over thirty years ago, but the fact that that window was made of bulletproof glass wasn't a revelation to me, it was that there were dings and cracks from bullets in said bulletproof glass
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Second, by disengaging from the generation of Egyptian-Oriental life: this is the function of his subduing his animal appetite in the interest of disseminating information, not in and for Egypt, but in and for European learning at large. 4/4
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The Egyptians are disemboweled for exposition, so to speak, then put together admonishingly by Lane. 3/4
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First, by interfering with the ordinary narrative course of human life: this is the function of his colossal detail, in which the observing intelligence of a foreigner can introduce and then piece together massive information. 2/4
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Someone’s always playing regulation games
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But to an even greater extent, Lane's capacity to rein in his profuse subject matter with an unyielding bridle of discipline and detachment depends on his cold distance from Egyptian life and Egyptian productivity. 2/2
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Yet no matter how odd and perverse the event and how lost we become in its dizzying detail, Lane is ubiquitous, his job being to reassemble the pieces and enable us to move on, albeit jerkily. 2/2
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of Cairene architecture, decoration, fountains, and locks. When a narrative strain re-emerges, it is clearly only as a formality. 3/3
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Thereafter we are told that the heat "excites the Egyptian [an unqualified generalization] to intemperance in sensual enjoyments," and soon are bogged down in descriptions, complete with charts and line drawings, 2/3
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What matters is that the report seem accurate, general, and dispassionate, that the English reader be convinced that Lane was never infected with heresy or apostasy, and finally, that Lane's text cancel the human content of its subject matter in favor of its scientific validity. 4/4
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No mind is given by Lane to the betrayal of his friendship with Ahmed or with the others who provide him with information. 3/4
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for the latter undercuts the former in no uncertain way. Thus what seems to be factual reporting of what 𝘰𝘯𝘦 rather peculiar Muslim does is made to appear by Lane as the candidly exposed center of 𝘢𝘭𝘭 Muslim faith. 2/4
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In all three portions of the Sheikh Ahmed episode the distance between the Muslim and Lane increases, even as in the action itself it decreases. 3/3
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inspired by Lane's audacious mimicry, can he go through the motions of praying by his side in a mosque. This final achievement is preceded by two scenes in which Ahmed is portrayed as a bizarre glass-eater and a polygamist. 2/3
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Thus while one portion of Lane's identity floats easily in the unsuspecting Muslim sea, a submerged part retains its secret European power, to comment on, acquire, possess everything around it. 3/3
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Lest that imply Lane's having lost his objectivity, he goes on to say that he conformed only to the words (his italics) of the Koran, and that he was always aware of his difference from an essentially alien culture. 2/3
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Every work on the Orient in these categories tries to characterize the place, of course, but what is of greater interest is the extent to which the work's internal structure is in some measure synonymous with a comprehensive 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 (or an attempt at it) of the Orient. 2/2
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This is where actually knowing a little about Karl Marx would've helped these chuds. There's no way the State would've withered away in five measly months.
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What that censor did was to stop and then chase away the sympathy, and this was accompanied by a lapidary definition: Those people, it said, don't suffer—they are Orientals and hence have to be treated in other ways than the ones you've just been using. 3/3
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could find a precollective, preofficial individuality in Asia—find and give in to its pressures upon his emotions, feelings, senses—only to give it up when he confronted a more formidable censor in the very vocabulary he found himself forced to employ. 2/3
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with the British colonial rule he condemned gets skewed back towards the old inequality between East and West we have so far remarked. Second, it requires us to ask where the human sympathy has gone, into what realm of thought it has disappeared while the Orientalist vision takes its place. 2/2
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Marx’s style pushes us right up against the difficulty of reconciling our natural repugnance as fellow creatures to the sufferings of Orientals while their society is being violently transformed with the historical necessity of these transformations. 3/3
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In article after article he returned with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution. 2/3
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The all-important kerning is good, but the centering is suspect
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is immense, but at bottom what the early Orientalist achieved, and what the non-Orientalist in the West exploited, was a reduced model of the Orient suitable for the prevailing, dominant culture and its theoretical (and hard after the theoretical, the practical) exigencies. 3/3
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justifying British intervention in the Crimean War. Cuvier found the Orient useful for his work 𝘓𝘦 𝘙𝘦𝘨𝘯𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘭 (1816). The Orient was usefully employed as conversation in the various salons of Paris. The list of references, borrowings, and transformations that overtook the Oriental idea 2/3
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Yet Mohammed is a hero, transplanted into Europe out of the same barbaric Orient found wanting by Lord Macaulay in his famous "Minute" of 1835, in which it was asserted that "our native subjects" have more to learn from us than we do from them.” 4/4
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Not a paragon of lucidity and stylistic grace himself, Carlyle asserts these things as a way of rescuing Mohammed from the Benthamite standards that would have condemned both Mohammed and him together. 3/4
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that is “a wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite– insupportable stupidity, in short.” 2/4
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The point here is that as a figure for his own time and place Mohammed is effaced, in order for a very slight human miniature of him to be left standing. 3/3
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Caussin’s intention was to leave nothing unsaid about Mohammed; the Prophet is thereby seen in a cold light, stripped both of his immense religious force and of any residual powers to frighten Europeans. 2/3
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Separate zones
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The default setting for those who reside at a higher level on a hierarchy is to marginalize those who are lower