The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe
October 7-8, 2011, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Levis Faculty Center
In 1492, the last Iberian Moorish kingdom of Granada fell to Christian Castile. This event was celebrated throughout Europe as the reconstitution of the continent’s natural southern frontier. Meanwhile, on Europe’s eastern borders, the Ottomans had conquered Constantinople in 1453, would defeat Hungary in the battle of Mohács in 1526, and arrive at the gates of Vienna in 1529. During this period, European powers also engaged in an ambivalent diplomatic and commercial exchange with the Infidel. The early modern formation of empires and Christianity’s increasing exposure to Islam were not only the cause for military and religious conflicts but also the source of cultural cross-fertilizations between the East and the West and a major force of European identity-building.
The pervasive presence of Islam in early modern Europe, both real and imaginary, its multi-faceted representations and its long-lasting cultural influence, is an ever growing field of humanistic enquiry. Disciplinary boundaries, however, tend to confine single studies of Islam’s influence on the continent. The purpose of this conference is to gather an international group of specialists who engage in a broad trans-disciplinary debate about the integral role Orientalism plays in the complex process of early modern national and European self-fashionings. In the vein of Edward Said’s influential work, we understand by Orientalism a discourse and a rhetorical strategy that cast “the Oriental” as one of the “deepest and most recurring images of the Other [that has] helped to define Europe (or the West).” What remains to be explored is the extent to which notions of collectivity and alterity based on the Oriental were used to distribute and hierarchize symbolic power within Europe.
Recent reappraisals of Said’s Orientalism have emphasized the internal value of the tropological use of Islam. As Nabil Matar has amply demonstrated in works such as Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (1999), admiration and wonder supersede alterity in early modern English accounts of the Orient, showing the limitations of the concept of Orientalism in the pre-Enlightenment period. In Europe (In Theory) (2007) Roberto Dainotto suggests that European identity has been formed in a dialectic that, as it creates the Orient as an external space of alterity, also orientalizes southern Europe in order to invent an internal opposite and to forge a sense of supra-national identity. Anouar Majid’s We Are All Moors (2009) investigates how the rhetorical instrumentalization of the Moor has served to (out-)cast ethnic and racial minorities in the West. These models of identity construction are best applicable to territories which have been under Islamic rule at some point in their history and in which a Muslim cultural imprint is most patent, like the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, Southern Italy, and the Balkans. Yet, in other parts of Europe the influence of Islam manifests itself in a similarly pervasive, if less conspicuous fashion—like the collaboration of France and Venice with the Ottomans or the close relations of English and Dutch privateers with North African states—leaving its marks on the northern countries.
By looking at temporal and geographical discrepancies in early modern representations of Islam, this conference will explore how discourses on and images of the Orient are historically determined and produced for local consumption, stressing issues that are mostly relevant for the societies in which they circulated. In particular, it will focus on the multiple uses of Islam as it is imagined in literary, religious, historiographical, and aesthetic discourses within the context of the rise within European states, the strive for imperial supremacy, and the shaping of a European identity. The influence of early modern Orientalism on these supra-national developments has received close to no critical attention and the conference’s interdisciplinary dialogue will provide new insights into the extent to which the formation of European identities is inseparable from discourses about Islam and the Orient. This approach towards the dialectics of Orientalism thus opens up numerous innovative venues of inquiry: Beyond being simplifications, what role do stereotypes play in the complex and often contradictory rhetorical dynamics that served to articulate, implement and promote both internal policies and supranational endeavors of imperial supremacy? To whom are these stereotypical representations addressed and through what media? In what instances does the creation of a fictive homogeneous nation lead to the conceptual “islamization” of minority groups? Is there a competition among European nation-states for the hegemony in the representation of the Oriental, and in which ways does it feed into a transnational rivalry for imperial power? What does the comparison of different national accounts of Orientalism reveal about the supposed homogeneity of the stereotypical Muslim?