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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Their writing was to be a fresh new repository of Oriental experienceโbut, as we shall see, even this project usually (but not always) resolved itself into the reductionism of the Orientalistic. 2/2
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For these pilgrims the Orientalized Orient, the Orient of Orientalist scholars, was a gauntlet to be run, just as the Bible, the Crusades, Islam, Napoleon, and Alexander were redoubtable predecessors to be reckoned with. 2/2
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It would be reconverted, restructured from the bundle of fragments brought back piecemeal by explorers, expeditions, commissions, armies, and merchants into lexicographical, bibliographical, departmentalized, and ๐ต๐ฆ๐น๐ต๐ถ๐ข๐ญ๐ช๐ป๐ฆ๐ฅ Orientalist sense. 3/3
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It would be converted from the consecutive experience of individual research into a sort of imaginary museum without walls, where everything gathered from the huge distances and varieties of Oriental culture became categorically ๐๐ณ๐ช๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ต๐ข๐ญ. 2/3
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Pick two.
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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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Someoneโs 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 ๐ฐ๐ฏ๐ฆ rather peculiar Muslim does is made to appear by Lane as the candidly exposed center of ๐ข๐ญ๐ญ 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 ๐ช๐ฏ๐ต๐ฆ๐ณ๐ฑ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ต๐ข๐ต๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ (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 sufferโthey 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 Asiaโfind and give in to its pressures upon his emotions, feelings, sensesโonly 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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Marxโs 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 ๐๐ฆ ๐๐ฆ๐จ๐ฏ๐ฆ ๐ข๐ฏ๐ช๐ฎ๐ข๐ญ (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