Orientalist Quotes

The students often like to talk about movies that they feel are Orientalist like 300 or Babel. They talk a lot about the possibility of U.S. aggression against Iran and the Iranian hostages being held by the U.S. in Iraq. ~ Mohammad Marandi

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers. ~ Paul Theroux

Pierre Eliot Trudeau's gift of an official policy of multiculturalism appeared in our midst in a period of rapid influx of third world immigrants into Canada, as well as in a moment of growing intensity of the old English-French rivalry....In this context the proclamation of multiculturalism could be seen as a diffusing or muting device for francophone national aspirations, as much as a way of coping with the non-European immigrants' arrival. It also sidelined the claims of Canada's aboriginal population, which had displayed a propensity toward armed struggles for land claims, as exemplified by the American Indian Movement (AIM). The reduction of these groups' demands into cultural demands was obviously helpful to the nationhood of Canada with its hegemonic anglo-Canadian national culture....It is not an accident that Bissoondath, who confuses between antiracism and multiculturalism, should fall for a political discourse of assimilation which keeps the so-called immigrants in place through a constantly deferred promise....As the focus shifts from processes of exclusion and marginalization to ethnic identities and their lack of adaptiveness, it is forgotten that these officially multicultural ethnicities, so embraced or rejected, are themselves the constructs of colonial - orientalist and racist - discourses. ~ Himani Bannerji

At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted.

I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and avatars swarmed in the shadows, coming to life amid draughts of sulphur and phosphorus like an animated fresco painted on the moving wall of sleep.

There followed a turbulent race through space. I soared, grasped by the hair by an invisible hand of will: an icy and powerful hand, in which I felt the hardness of precious stones, and which I sensed to be the hand of Ethal. Dizziness was piled upon dizziness in that flight to the abyss, under skies the colour of camphor and salt, skies whose nocturnal brilliance had a terrible limpidity. I was spun around and around, in bewildering confusion, above deserts and rivers. Great expanses of sand stretched into the distance, mottled here and there by monumental shadows. At times we would pass over cities: sleeping cities with obelisks and cupolas shining milk-white in the moonlight, between metallic palm-trees. In the extreme distance, amid bamboos and flowering mangroves, luminous millennial pagodas descended towards the water on stepped terraces. ~ Jean Lorrain

We should strive to focus our lens on what connects us as humans as opposed to our differences. In doing so, not only can we challenge the Orientalist and colonial aspects of traditional photographic narratives, but we can also create a new visual legacy marked by equitable discourse. ~ Neeta Satam

Theres no hope, none, of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody, off ... By the end of this hour I will be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool. a self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an orientalist, socialist, fascist, CIA agent, and worse. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Some individuals came right out and accused me of being a Neo-Orientalist (in a pejorative Edward Said sense of the term). So of course eventually I bristled at the questions themselves. They seemed to stem from an obsessive political correctness that wished to brand every Western photographer working in Asia as a neo-colonialist, an ethnographer, or a culprit secretly advancing a hegemonic agenda. The idea that people of one culture cannot create valid art in another I found ludicrous and restrictive to say the least. ~ Waswo X. Waswo