Since I read Said’s Orientalism many years ago, I’ve been wondering why we don’t have a parallel branch of “knowledge” labeled Occidentalism. Well, it actually seems pretty obvious why: Orientalism is a colonial discourse produced as part of Western expansion…
In passing, Tavakoli-Targhi lists Joseph Emin as another Iranian traveler to Europe who wrote an account of his journey: Joseph Emin (1726-1809), a native of Hamadan, was another traveler who visited England in 1751 and wrote an account of his…
Even when I was studying fine art in Iran (its abortion by Islamic Cultural Revolution notwithstanding), I knew more about the history of European art than that of Iran. Like many of my peers, I assumed that European portraiture influence…
This is a quick note and a place holder to return to the historical figure and to the general topic of the “Persianate woman” in Europe. From Refashioning Iran: In the first decades of the seventeenth century, an Iranian woman…
Tavakoli-Targhi uses “Persianate Europology” in reference to writings about Europe by Persian chroniclers. I’m beginning to see the utility of Persianate as it refers to cultural production in and outside geographical borders of Iran (whose territorial lines are still unclear…
From Refashioning Iran, pp. 33-34: The challenge of postcolonial historiography is to re-historicize the processes that have been concealed and ossified by the Eurocentric accounts of modernity. This challenge also involves uncovering the underside of “occidental rationality.” Such a project…
From Refashioning Iran, p 33: The obliteration of the intellectual contributions of Persianate scholars to the formation of Orientalism coincided with the late eighteenth-century emergence of authorship as a principle of textual attribution and creditation in Europe. The increases significance…
From Refashioning Iran, p 32: Based on these and other collated texts, it seems that in its formative phase European students of the Orient, rather than initiating “original” and “scientific” studies, had relied heavily on research findings of native scholars.…
From Refashioning Iran, p20: The modular histories of Orientalism grounded exclusively in a European context the intellectual contributions of Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), Sir William Jones (1746-94), and other “pioneering” Orientalists. This historiographical selection played a strategic role in constituting “the West”…