Chapter 5 argues that, because of the specific transcultural history and culture of the Mediterranean area, the Mediterranean crime novel articulates a criticism of prevalent ideas of homogeneous national identities that disregard complexity, and instead of unifying, fracture and alienate cultures and individuals. It contends that Mediterranean crime fiction contributes to the discourse on identity with a sophisticated, multilayered analysis that develops at three levels: national, postcolonial and supranational. What brings together these different discourses on identity and belonging is the theme of internal Orientalism, that is, the tendency of nations or regions to view the cultures and religions to some of their parts ‒ typically the South and East ‒ as more conservative and primitive. As this chapter argues, building on a discourse started in Chapters 1 and 3, the Mediterranean novel reflects the discriminatory cultures and practices of the nation-state and advocates for inclusion. In so doing, they provide a counter-narrative to the current political moment in Europe and in the world, which is marked by stasis, borders and exclusion.

This chapter reconstructs how Tagore and Nag’s agenda for a global humanism, inspired by the template of Greater India, was put to the test at Visva-Bharati university, a space closely monitored by the colonial authorities as a potential breeding ground for sedition. Tagore’s peculiar blend of Orientalism and internationalism resonated with an international group of intellectuals, including Romain Rolland, Carlo Formichi, Sylvain Lévi and Yone Noguchi, but ultimately lost traction amidst the ideological turmoil and political developments that marked the 1920s and 30s. As Tagore’s controversial visit to Fascist Italy painfully revealed, a vision of world order premised on the cooperation of cultural ambassadors from the East and West sharing the same humanist ideals, became increasingly untenable. Furthermore, the Indian exceptionalism and cultural essentialism that energized Tagore’s vision turned out to be unpalatable for figures such as Lévi, who supported the GIS but dismissed any notion of an Eastern mission to ‘redeem the West’. Japan’s geopolitical ascendency altered the East for good and shattered the dream of a united Asian front inspired by the legacies of ‘Greater India’.

Exchanges between Eastern and Western cultures were central to representations of human-animal relations in the eighteenth century. When in 1713 Alexander Pope published an essay against cruelty to animals, he observed how “Everyone knows how remarkable the Turks are for their Humanity in this kind.” This chapter explains how feeling for fellow creatures was coupled in English minds with Eastern – Ottoman and Arab as well as Persian and Indian – compassion for them. Derived from mercantile, scholarly, and scientific exchanges; travelers’ tales; and widely circulating translations of Eastern beast fables, what Srinivas Aravamudan calls “Enlightenment Orientalism” is examined in relation to a contemporary Ottoman representation of animals, the natural history and storytelling of Evliya Çelebi (1611–c. 1687). It also considers such texts as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Pope’s Windsor-Forest and Essay on Man, James Thomson’s The Seasons, and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. These texts present different versions of multiple species of animal kind as “peoples” in the sense of the Qur’anic verse, explicated by Sarra Tlili, that ‘”there is not an animal in the earth nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are people like you.”

The bafflingly eclectic exoticisms of The Magic Flute arise from at least three literary traditions at work in the libretto: seraglio or abduction opera (Tamino sets out heroically to rescue Pamina); The Arabian Nights (Papageno’s comic journey turns on wishes and their magical fulfilment), and a didactic, princely encounter with (some notion of) Egyptian antiquity (Act 2). A labile discourse of nature adds further complexity, encompassing the regulative and the remote, civilization and savagery. This chapter, treating exoticism not as a theme within the opera, but as what the opera is about, posits an over-arching notion of “Enlightened orientalism” (Srinivas Aravamudan). The opera offers both its fictional characters, and the audience, a series of potentially transformative encounters with (what is posited as) the ancient and original sources of culture. These encounters cut across, and sometimes problematize, distinctions of self and Other.

This chapter focuses on heavy metal music and culture in the Middle East. It provides a summary of previous research on metal in the region and touches upon common clichés of metal as a source of counterculture, revolution and change. It then addresses the complicated relationship between metal studies and Orientalism. It is the author’s contention that research on metal in the Middle East has been directly influenced by Orientalist discourse. The author further argues that the impact of this discourse has led to the politicisation and exoticisation of a particular figure – the ‘Muslim metalhead’. This chapter seeks to contribute to the current discussion on ‘Oriental metal’ as an attempt to exotify the very existence (and art) of metalheads from a region that has been geopolitically framed as the ‘Middle East’.

Edward Said was known not only for his literary studies, his strong support for Palestinian identity, and his influential political commentary but for his criticism of Orientalist scholarship and its impact on the image of Muslims maintain by many Westerners. But for all his criticism of those scholars, it may be argued, however, that Said missed much about their work that should have been addressed. In this chapter, we consider the Orientalist romanticization of the Arabic language, their dismissal of actual Islamic law court decisions, and their emphasis on Arab stasis rather than their social fluidity and creativeness. If we paint a fuller picture of the Orientalists’ scholarship, we can understand both the strengths and weakness not only of their approach to the cultures of the region but where Said himself was able or unable to fulfill his own professed goals.

This chapter surveys the market for popular works on world religions that exploded in Britain during the 1890s. Critics have explored how scholars like the Oxford Sanskritist F. Max Müller laid the groundwork for religious studies in the twentieth century by mapping global religions onto a global hierarchy of languages and cultures. Such work tends to confirm our view of Orientalism as an extension of imperial power-knowledge. However, middle-class liberals, evangelical missionaries, and occult enthusiasts all had their own reasons for exploring the religions of the world. Their fascinations unfolded against the backdrop of imperial power but were seldom reducible to it. In addition, studying these publications can challenge our association of the “Naughty Nineties” with radicalism and subversion by showing the importance that middlebrow religious culture played in broadening religious horizons. Popular Victorian publications on Buddhism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism would lay the basis on which Anglo-American religious liberalism could flourish into the postwar period.

Writings about East Asia provide an invaluable archive to study 1890s understandings of cosmopolitanism. In this period that predated the extensive translation of East Asian literatures into English, the work of cultural and literary mediation was carried out largely by nonspecialists. Focusing on Japan and China respectively, this chapter compares the representation of East Asian cultures in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kokoro (1896) and Wo Chang’s Britain Through Chinese Spectacles (1897). Both writers sought to widen the aesthetic, ethical, and political horizons of English-speaking readers. This chapter argues for the need to look beyond orientalism in order to appreciate the complexity of writers’ critical engagement with cosmopolitanism, and to understand the aspirations and failures of cosmopolitanism in this period. 1890s writings about East Asia affected the world consciousness of the 1890s and simultaneously contributed to the processes of literary networking that opened English literature to wider exchanges and connections.

Chapter 1 identifies and analyzes the discourses that went into the “Indian Mona Lisa” trope. It qualifies the painting’s formal label, Portrait of Radha–Kishangarh (referring to the goddess, Krishna’s favorite), and informal one “Bani Thani” (referring to the purported model of the portrait, a concubine of the crown prince). It does so first by situating the painting among contemporaneous Mughal and Rajput Women Portraits. Further, it traces art-critical discourses surrounding the discovery of the Kishangarh School of Art during colonial times and the nationalist appropriation of the painting as an emblem for Rajput spiritual art, apotheosized in the issuing of a stamp. It describes the search for a model behind the painting, the protestations of this theory, and the painting’s current role in a popular cyber-orientalist love story.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

“Origin Myths,” explores how literary historians narrated the origins of Persian and Urdu languages and literary traditions. I challenge the nationalist narratives around these traditions, of Iranian continuity and Indo-Muslim rupture, which remain dominant today. Tracing the reception of evolutionary theories and Orientalist philology in Iran and India, I analyze fundamental differences in nationalist thought in the two contexts. Iranians articulated a vision of linear language history, emphasizing continuity with pre-Islamic precursors to modern Persian which the addition of an Arabic element did not fundamentally change. On the other hand, Indian Muslims offered a contrary account of Urdu’s origins, emphasizing rupture with the pre-Islamic past and the constitutive role of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish in Urdu’s formation. Through a comparative reading of these "origin myths" I demonstrate how historically contingent the dominant narratives around Persian and Urdu were.

Salman Rushdie’s work has exponentially engaged with questions of separatism, terror, and terrorism in an aesthetic mode that draws on certain Orientalist and neo-Orientalist tropes. Taking account of geopolitical and local contexts, this chapter focuses on how Rushdie in fiction and nonfiction has responded to separatism, terror, and terrorism at local, national, and global levels. At the core of this discussion is an analysis of Rushdie’s engagement with Kashmir, from Midnight’s Children to Shalimar the Clown and Joseph Anton. By bringing postcolonial critiques of Orientalism into conversation with recent developments in world-systems analysis, the chapter traces the ways in which Rushdie’s representation of the wider geopolitical consequences of terrorism and state-led terror helps to make sense of the war machine of empire in ways that are sometimes obfuscated by Rushdie’s self-fashioning as a secular hero of free speech.

This chapter highlights translation as both formally and thematically at the very core of Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing – as its origin, strategy, and target. Its first part considers the ways in which the author’s engagement with the two cultures at the heart of his own experience helped shape a translational realism and a poetics of originary translatedness that are central to his style and that comment implicitly on their own constructedness as well as on our narrative and critical assumptions. The chapter then turns to a focus on Ishiguro’s self-consciously ‘translated’ narrative voices training us in navigating their liminalities, thus prompting reflection, on various levels, on the limits of knowing. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Ishiguro’s poetics of translation – or more precisely the liminalities of its subtly self-reflexive translational realism and voice – draws attention to itself as such, thereby extending the novels’ concerns to an ethics of reading that also models an ethics for reading world literature.

This brief overview of the book builds on the Italian partisan song Bella Ciao, a song that has been sung in many Arab streets in recent years. The book echoes the fact that the song can be sung over two tempos, and that the history of citizenship, representation and violence in the Arab worlds can be apprehended over the longue duree of latent citizenship, or the fast-paced events of the 2011 Arab Uprisings. Both tempos are connected in this book, which makes a contribution to democratic theory and to the history of popular politics in the MENA region.

This chapter presents ethnographic narratives on immersion in Chechen social life, reflections on the role of positionality and subjectivity in shaping the research, the ethics of the study, and grounded perspectives on the key elements of the argument: legal pluralism, conflict, and the foundations of social and political orders in Chechnya. The chapter starts with one extraordinary Chechen woman’s family history, which illustrates life in Chechnya during the time of the Soviet Union, the troubled times of de facto Chechen independence in the 1990s, and during the Chechen wars. The chapter then explores the roles of outsider status, language, religion, and gender in the co-production of knowledge between the researcher and study participants. In the following part, the chapter presents a thick description of the functioning of legal pluralism and the traps of orientalist romanticization and essentialization in studying it. Next comes a description of extended family as the principal social organization in contemporary Chechnya, which debunks the stereotypes of the all-powerful Chechen clans. The chapter documents the lived experiences of dictatorship and violent conflict and then turns to a discussion of the ethics of the study under these conditions.

This chapter provides a historical analysis of state-building in Chechnya through the lens of law. It gives an account of the formation and development of legal pluralism under the Russian colonial administration and Soviet rule. The chapter shows that the politics of the imperial and Soviet authorities regarding legal pluralism can be explained by state capacity and ideology. The Russian Empire institutionalized legal pluralism as part of a divide and rule strategy, a response to low state capacity, and an orientalist ideology. When the Empire collapsed in 1917, local actors attempted to mobilize Sharia for competing political projects. Even the Bolsheviks initially built a surprising coalition with religious leaders. Upon the consolidation of Soviet rule, the central government attempted to eliminate legal pluralism in the region. The Soviet drive to ensure legal centralism was fueled by the ideology of modernization and increased state capacity. However, the project ultimately failed because of Stalin’s forced deportation of the entire Chechen nation to Central Asia in 1944. State violence strengthened the Chechen national identity and alienated Chechens from state law. After the return to the Caucasus in 1957, Chechens remained marginalized in the Soviet state-building project and preserved customary and religious institutions.