Orientalism and 18th-Century Travelogues Edward Said (1979) Orientalism New York: Vintage BooksThe Orient

a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western consciousnessthe Orient = passive, studied, seen, observed, object of knowledgeOrientalist scholars (westerners) = active, students, seers, observers, subjects of knowledgeThe East = mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the Westeccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passiveOrientalism

Western discursive construction of the Orient (power/knowledge)The Oriental

feminine, exotic, weak, dangerous, passive, irrational, menacing, untrustworthy

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu born in the year of the Glorious Revolution, 1688 1717, journeyed to the Ottoman Empire

husband, Edward Wortley, British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte kept a journal and wrote letters on Turkish culture and habitsedited and polished epistolary account of her travels based on these records travel narrative - published in 1763, a year after her death

Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in different Parts of Europe. Which Contain, Among other Curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks, Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, Voltaire, & Gibbon read and praised them

Turkish Embassy Letters ??? rubric of colonial discourse and Orientalismthe imperial observer examining the unheard or repressed Oriental other??? Levantinization - mechanism by which Montagu attempts to escape from pure Englishness into Turkishness, but fails

fantasy of assimilation to Ottoman culture, fantasy of going Levantinecelebration of cultural difference !!! letters of ambassadorial travel close with a definite return home to Englishness