This chapter traces the emergence of a North African critique of Arab nationalism and its project for the Arab Renaissance in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab defeat. It takes up the journeys of intellectuals Moroccan Abdallah Laroui and Tunisian Hichem Djaït and how they challenged the dominant frameworks of Arab nationalism and pan-Arab unity at the 1970 Louvain Conference on the Arab renaissance. The two critiqued both the ideological uses of history by the national project and the epistemological structures of Orientalist scholarship, which they accused of perpetuating a discourse of Arab cultural crisis and decadence. This chapter then traces their engagements with figures such as Gustav von Grunebaum, Louis Massignon, and Jacques Berque in the publishing landscape of Parisian orientalism. As such, these two examples illustrate a new position in Arab thought, which believed in the imperative of reclaiming historical thinking as a tool for intellectual decolonization. In charting these entanglements, this chapter sheds light on the continued ties between North Africa, the Arab East, and Parisian Orientalism, and the debate on cultural authenticity and Arab modernity.

Alongside the rise of Romanticism, which emerged as a reaction to the perceived excesses of modernism and industrialization that threatened humanity’s integrity, came the rise of Romantic Orientalism as an academic field, institutionalized in universities and scholarly associations in the nineteenth century. Romantic Orientalists sought to rediscover in the East the lost innocence of human minds, or the pure knowledge of God, obscured by industrial civilization. Romantic Sinologists revived many of the Jesuits’ idealized views of China, immersing themselves in Confucian texts and Chinese folk religious practices to seek the untainted, original human soul and God-inspired morality. Notable Sinologists such as James Legge and J. J. M. de Groot exemplified this tradition in the study of classic texts and ethnography, respectively. They argued that Chinese civilization had remained continuous and unchanged for thousands of years, and its divinely inspired morality was equal to or superior to that of Europe.

Political discourses on China have swung between naïve idealization and racist contempt over the past decade. This pendulum swing has roots in the oscillating extremes of positive and negative interpretations of China in Western scholarship over the last eight centuries. From the medieval church’s depiction of the Tartars, through early modern priests’ debates about Chinese religions, Enlightenment thinkers’ disputes over the nature of China’s political economy and moral systems, to the Romantic and scientific-racist Sinology of the nineteenth century, perceptions of China have alternated between seeing it as a civilization sharing Christian morality with Europe and as a satanic or idolatrous civilization threatening Christian values and freedom. These shifts have stemmed from both the internal dynamics of the academic field and evolving political and economic relations between Europe and China.

Amid intensifying inter-imperial rivalries at the turn of the twentieth century, Darwinism, scientific-racism, and ethnonationalism replaced Romanticism as the dominant academic trends in Europe. Consequently, Romantic Orientalism gave way to scientific-racist Orientalism. The early Sinologists’ Romanticist view of an innocent, spiritual China morally superior to Europe was replaced by the scientific-racist perspective that depicted the Chinese as principal animists and fetishists, trapped in an inferior culture to be eradicated or subjugated in the inter-racial struggle for survival. Both James Legge and J. J. M. de Groot, who had previously expressed sympathetic views of China, adopted disdainful perspectives in the late nineteenth century. This shift in their views illustrates the sharp turn in the prevailing assumptions within the field of Sinology and Orientalism at large.

In the Coda, I revisit the book’s main themes from non-European perspectives. I suggest that as much as the notion of world literature and the comparative philological apparatus underlying it were conceived and elaborated in European criticism upon late-enlightenment encounters with Oriental literatures, the reception of non-European economies played a comparable role in shaping European discourses of world literature. Directly or indirectly, each design discussed in previous chapters resonated with or drew on non-European conceptions of exchange, wealth, and property (or, rather, what was perceived as such in the encounters). These include the Oriental “bazaar economy”, the anthropology of the gift in pre-modern communities, the isolationist policies of Edo-period Japan, the cult of the indigenously produced in pre-industrial societies, and the dissolution of commons in colonial land reform. Based on these comparisons, the conclusion offers tentative suggestions about a global political economy of world literature.

Chapter 2 explores American servicemen’s everyday lives through their sensory encounters with China. While largely maintaining a privileged lifestyle separate from Chinese society, they also forged intimate connections with local populations by exchanging goods, service, language, and culture, an encounter that both followed and contradicted official policies and popular representations. As tourists, consumers, cultural messengers, and diplomats in the field, their encounters with China were characterized by fascination and contempt, enchantment and alienation. While their sensorial experiences and narratives were conditioned by preexisting Orientalist beliefs and racist prejudices, GIs’ cultural identities were reshaped by daily interactions involving new sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and touches.

This chapter considers the deployment of radical Orientalism as a mode of political critique in the popular fiction of the bestselling Chartist leader and author George W. M. Reynolds. It focuses on the structural congruences between the depictions of aristocratic debauchery in his two Mysteries series (1844–8; 1848–56) and the figuration of Old Corruption as in league with the Jewish sweater in ‘The Seamstress’ in Reynolds’s Miscellany (1850). Examination of this alignment permits a discussion of the mutable hierarchies within the category of the People at mid-nineteenth century, focused specifically on those groups excluded from full political rights: the working-class man, women, and Jews. It considers how Reynolds’s use of radical literary-political tropes positions Jews as Occidental in matters of parliamentary democracy, but designates them Oriental when the sweating system that they are understood to represent is figured as an atavistic, foreign, and unchristian form of economics.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

When the atrocities of the French Revolution led Romantic authors to test the viability of anti-imperial imaginaries in their poetry, many of them relocated revolution from Europe to so-called Oriental geographies. The cultural and aesthetic distance of exoticized topographies generated a spectacle of revolutionary violence that could be consumed safely in Britain. In the poetic works of Thomas Moore (Lalla Rookh), Felicia Hemans (The Abencerrage), Lord Byron (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Giaour), Percy Shelley (Laon and Cythna), Robert Southey (Thalaba the Destroyer), and Thomas Love Peacock (Ahrimanes), revolutionary struggle is envisaged as an enterprise marked by a cyclical logic that anticipates the return of empire: It is redefined as an inevitable failure to undo oppressive power structures. An ethnoracially demarcated space of fantasy, the Orient allows these poets to experiment with revolutionary narratives in a way that affectively neutralizes the lived trauma of revolution by reducing it to a dehistoricized and yet universalizable configuration. In the Orientalist poetry of Romantics, then, revolution becomes imaginable as an anti-imperial event with the caveat that its present unrealizability is affirmed in its consumption as a culturally and ethnoracially distanced spectacle.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce anti-Asian racism and the COVID-19 pandemic. It begins with the story of Kristina Arevalo, an Asian American scholar pursuing a PhD in developmental psychology in New York City who experienced racial discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is consistent with the history of racial scapegoating in the US, a strategy of blaming Asian Americans for health and economic crises, as well as wars, that relies on fear and hate to justify violence against them. This chapter is informed by Asian critical race theory (AsianCrit), discusses who are Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, some popular myths about them, and their place in a racial position model. It examines how anti-Asian racism is supported by the model minority myth, the Yellow Peril racist trope, the perpetual foreigner stereotype, and Orientalism. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on the Delano grape strike and linked fate. It ends with a discussion of Kristina Arevalo and rethinking who is considered a “Real American.”

This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Hassan Hamze is about the birth of the Arabic dictionary in the eighth century, a birth linked to that of other linguistic and religious disciplines in a flourishing society that would inherit the sciences of the ancients before developing and transmitting them to modern Western civilization. The small, utilitarian lexicons quickly gave way to the great dictionary al-ʿAyn, which established the Arabic lexicographical tradition. The bilingual dictionary did not appear until much later, first with the languages of the Arab-Muslim world, then with Latin in Andalusia after the eleventh century, and with other languages, particularly Western ones, in the modern era. Its role today is significant in terminological creation. The Arabic dictionary is, above all, a dictionary of word families classified by consonantal roots. The classification by words, which appeared very early in specialized dictionaries, did not appear in the general dictionary until the mid twentieth century, under the influence of the European dictionary, due to the issues posed by the status of short vowels and broken plurals.

This chapter argues that Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper saw Michael Field as a poet of Empire and proposes that scholarship on Michael Field has overlooked the conservative, reactionary social and racial politics of their oeuvre. The chapter surveys Michael Field’s often complex and contradictory responses to race, empire, and imperialism, as seen in their dedicatory verses to various national heroes and their play Brutus Ultor (addressed ‘To The People of England’). The chapter then examines their jingoistic attitude towards the Boer War at the turn of the century, and their orientalised depictions of ‘East’ in plays such as Queen Mariamne (1908), that are revealing of their treatment of racial and ethnic differences.

Interests, desires, and appropriations by modernist theatre practitioners of aspects and materialities of other cultures for the renovation of their theatre traditions cohered under the term ‘orientalism’. Later twentieth-century postmodernist theatre practitioners revived the practice in a largely postcolonial world, but under the umbrella term ‘interculturalism’. Using the tenets of postmodern theories (simulations and bricolages) or the principles of rituals from traditional cultures, intercultural theatre thrived in a globalised world. While globalised culture came under critique for appropriation and exploitation, early twenty-first-century scholars sought to revive interest in the study of otherness in theatre but operated again under such new terminology as ‘interweaving performance cultures’ and new interculturalism from below. Simultaneously, scholars from the Global South and from Asia further contested West/East axes of intercultural borrowing and theorising as well as the trajectory of western-centric modernism. This chapter traces those trajectories and their histories.

Begins by considering the visual discrepancy between the earliest photographs of the dancers from the original production of The Rite of Spring (taken by Charles Gerschel) and the sketches made by art student Valentine Gross during rehearsals and first performances: a discrepancy between a dissonant, harsh geometry and an art-nouveau-inspired, impressionistic beauty. Explores how this disjunction reflects a broader cultural anxiety of the period – as apparent in some of the first press reviews of the ballet – about dancing bodies, an aesthetics of ugliness and the grotesque. Describes how Nijinsky’s choreography and its obvious bodily deformity evoked parallels with the avant-garde practices of Futurism, Cubism and primitivism, as well as with a lineage of established ballet traditions (character dance and grotesque ballet). A final section explains how Nijinsky managed to re-frame his dancers on stage so that they could invert the power dynamics of the standard Orientalist gaze.

Chapter VI explores the means through which imperial impositions and military occupation deliberately narrate, interact with, and affect internal dynamics of patriarchy in colonised Palestine – relating this to both articulations and expressions of violence against women within this context. Moving beyond the “essentialising cultural logics” that render patriarchal violence as a ‘static’ and ‘fixed’ component of ‘Palestinian culture’, this chapter thus joins with the pursuit of many Palestinian feminists to examine the complex “interplay between a colonial politics of exclusion and a localised culture of control” as it is narrated and deployed in relation to violence against Palestinian women (Shalhoub-Kervorkian and Daher-Nashif 2013, 298). Yet, I caution against centralising Israel’s military occupation as causal or ‘explanatory’ of internal dynamics of violence, arguing that making this link uncritically risks positioning Palestinian women’s bodies as discursive and material sites upon which an internal patriarchal order ‘in crisis’ can be normatively reclaimed.

Before the categories of Latino/a or Hispanic were adopted in academia and literary criticism in the United States, Latinx writers were often (mis)placed within a wide and ambiguous “Spanish” literary scene. This chapter explores how this tendency also extended to Filipinx American writers. It centers on José Garcia Villa’s early years in the United States, in particular the semi-autobiographical short stories in Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (1933), wherein he reflects on his experience as a young Filipino American writer and finds continuities between the Philippines and New Mexico.