This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.

Although Europe deserves condemnation for the ethnocentric and racist notions and attitudes that flourished within it both before and during the era of imperialism, these were preceded, accompanied, and countered by a singular interest in and openness to other peoples and cultures. The marks of this openness were an exceptional interest in travel and writings about it, in learning non-European languages and translating and circulating texts written in them, in correcting their own forbears’ calumnies and defamations of others by exposing myths and legends for what they were, and by acknowledging the historical and cultural achievements of other peoples. The notion that Asian governments were despotic spread chiefly because those who adopted it feared the spread of autocracy in their own countries, and it drew forth harsh criticism. Images of other countries or regions, especially China and the Near East, became mirrors in which Europeans contemplated the limitations and narrow prejudices of their own way of life.

The global and historical entanglements between articifial intelligence (AI)/robotic technologies and Buddhism, as a lived religion and philosophical tradition, are significant. This chapter sets out three key sites of interaction between Buddhism and AI/robotics. First, Buddhism, as an ontological model of mind (and body) that describes the conditions for what constitutes artificial life. Second, Buddhism defines the boundaries of moral personhood and thus the nature of interactions between human and non-human actors. And finally, Buddhism can be used as an ethical framework to regulate and direct the development of AI/robotics technologies. It argues that Buddhism provides an approach to technology that is grounded in the interdependence of all things, and this gives rise to both compassion and an ethical commitment to alleviate suffering.

Why was Oliver Goldsmith interested in the Orient? Specifically what parts of the Orient was he most interested in? Where did he obtain his information about the Orient? How did he modify his sources and what is distinctive about his literary uses of the Orient? Although critics have accused Goldsmith variously of fabricating an imaginary and exotic Orient, exploiting the Orient merely for satirical uses, and being sick of Oriental fads, this chapter argues that Goldsmith’s interest in the Orient was intellectual as well as imaginative, serious, and playful at the same time. The chapter focuses on Goldsmith’s most extensive engagement with the Orient in The Citizen of the World, but also examines his discussions of the Orient in his book reviews, theater reviews, periodical publications, and his more extensive historical and geographical writings.

The introduction sets the book’s agenda: to offer a novel account of crusade culture from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) drawing on Middle English romances and their contexts in various literary, historical, and legal documents (in English, French, Occitan, German, and Latin). The political culture to which post-1291 crusade romances belonged, I argue, was ambivalent, self-critical, and riddled with anxieties. These anxieties were about issues as fundamental and diverse as God’s endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of crusaders to Islam, sinfulness and divisions within the Christian community, and the morality of violence. After situating the book’s key claims within debates on Edward Said’s Orientalism and crusade literature, I present its methodology: engaged historicism, attention to how romance writers adapted their sources, and analysis of emotional rhetoric. The book’s contributions to the history of emotions and Middle English studies are discussed, as are the new insights it provides into the historical dimensions of the genre of romance.

This chapter considers a key change in the military spectacle of the West India Regiments in the mid-to-late 1850s when the uniform for all ranks below commissioned officer was altered to one inspired by France’s Zouave forces. Representing a form of martial rebranding, this was a dramatic shift that ended the policy of using the same basic uniforms as other British Foot Regiments. Two interpretive frames for this ‘Zouavisation’ of the West India Regiments are offered. First, there was a desire to emulate and replicate the picturesque valour that the French Zouaves had displayed in the Crimean War, a sentiment strongly expressed by Queen Victoria herself. Second, there was an effort to assign uniforms that were more sensitive to the local conditions in which British military units operated. In the case of the West India Regiments, this policy served to inscribe racial differences between troops, as demonstrated by the fact that the officers of the regiments were not required to wear Zouave-style uniforms. This change reflected shifting ideas about people of African descent, as well as about tropicality, in this period.

The conclusion revisits the book’s key claims and maps new avenues for research on medieval European representations of, and self-definition in relation to, Muslims and Islam. It closes with a brief discussion of the qualified anti-crusade argument, grounded in imperfect ideas of equality, voiced by the French lawyer Honorat Bovet in his widely disseminated Arbre des batailles (1387).

Does postcolonial studies present a theoretical framework appropriate to Romanization studies? Does Romanization studies have evidence appropriate for postcolonial theories? Even though postcolonial theories did not stem from ancient Roman imperialism per se, they provide a heuristical tool to destabilize the discourse that has sustained imperial systems through history. They help Roman historians and archaeologists to reach a deeper understanding of the dynamic process of imperial discourses and to deconstruct the imperial discourses built through the complex layers of histories. This chapter does not deliver an exhaustive analysis or a landscape overview of postcolonial studies according to a certain order of significance or thematic categorization as is the common practice in the discipline, for example, along the triad of Said-Bhabha-Spivak or along the axis of theoretical and materialist approaches. Instead, here I explore postcolonial ideas which have influenced and reoriented Romanization studies.

Immigrant authors in the United States write under the shadow of hostile laws that challenge expectations of political equality and belonging. Tales of repudiation and resistance mark the uncertainties of transit and the dangers of arrival. This study of Asian American texts exposes how US immigration laws naturalize race and redefine identities and lineage. Immigration law transformed American narrative forms to create a global and intercultural literature in which Asian migrants refuse to be turned into perpetual outsiders.

At the turn of the century as the western frontier came to a close, America expanded its reach across the Pacific and in so doing solidified a burgeoning modern gay identity steeped in imaginations of the “Orient.” Pacific Islanders and Asian immigrants themselves in fact played a crucial role by illustrating a different way of being to western writers such as Joaquin Miller and Charles Warren Stoddard, even as they were appropriated in bohemians’ explorations of their own same-sex sexuality.

This chapter explores the fascination with things Japanese (the term japonisme was first coined in 1872), which manifested itself in many ways, not least through the collecting of objets d’art – an obsession of Debussy’s. It will examine other ‘orientalisms’ and the role of the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in promoting them. This chapter intersects with Debussy’s interests in a number of ways. His attendance at the Exposition Universelle was seminal to his future development, not least in alerting him to musical cultures remote from his own. However, whilst we can hear the influence of these experiences in his music, Debussy was also a fanatical collector and browser of shops specialising in exotic products. He would often spend housekeeping money on objects for his collection, much to the despair of his partners. This chapter reflects changing consumption in France.

Wagner’s fascination with Indian literary culture followed a similar impulse from Schopenhauer, Friedrich Schlegel, and Karl Köppen, among others, as part of an ‘oriental renaissance’. The German construction of India, after William Jones’ pioneering work on Sanskrit Upanishads while in the East India Company, accrued around the promise of philological routes to the origins of world culture, demonstrating a primordial link between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. It also offers a context for Wagner’s passion for Buddhism, as distinct from Vedic Hinduism, and the figure of the Buddha, most notable in Die Sieger and Parsifal, but also traceable in the Ring.

In Chapter 5, I follow this lead further and demonstrate that one of the most prominent sites where this new aesthetic regime and its colonial history was articulated most forcefully was the nineteenth-century French novel. Discussing Jacques Rancière’s influential work on novels by Balzac and Flaubert and his suggestion of the new idea of literature emerging through the “democratic petrification” of writing, this chapter shows how the context of such a development in France was historically much wider than developments within its national borders. Instead of thinking the historicity of literature through Europe alone, this chapter shows how the literary sovereign shaped the central ideas of textualization and readability through colonial documents, translations, textual representation of the orient, and so on. This textual history is then embedded within larger registers of visuality in contemporary French cultures that extended the colonial paradigm further.

Critical comparative law, as we know it, defines itself negatively: it stands not for, but against something, that is, traditional comparative law. This state of affairs turns critique into a weak programme for it tends to polarise and polemicise the discussion on comparative law and its methods. Critique divides an ‘us’ (the avant-garde) against ‘them’ (the mainstream). This chapter argues for a paradigm shift, reconceptualising critique as an ethos: an attitude that requires the comparative lawyer to position and reposition her- and himself time and again towards the received methodological tools and themes currently in vogue. Consequently, critical comparative law cannot be identified with advocating a specific substantive proposition or method, yet constitutes a mode of reflection. In this chapter, the critical positional work revolves around the view on (comparative) law from beyond the Western world. It first provincialises and specialises critical comparative law and, on this basis, discusses critically the topics of legal relativism, decolonialism, and orientalism, using universal human rights as its core theme. An integrated excursus on ‘law as such’, finally, clarifies some long-standing critical issues in the triangle of truth, language, and the lifeworld of the comparatist.