What is it about?
That Travels in Arabia Deserta, The Desert and the Sown and Seven Pillars of Wisdom are Orientalist texts seems a fact few would dispute. However, like all texts these too are not free from ambiguity: In Identitas Oriens the author shows that Doughty, Bell and Lawrence are indeed assuming different, often conflicting positions vis-à-vis the Orient.
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Why is it important?
Instead of another critique of these classic orientalist travelogues Katharina Pink offers an acute rereading that unearths the slippages in the texts and links these to the faultlines in the authors' biographies. Identitas Orients thus offers not merely a timely revisitation, but an insightful foray into the 'Postcolonial Unconscious' (Lazarus).
Perspectives
Reencountering the texts through Pink's work gave me the sensation of seeing the works through a(nother) mirror. Her extremely close reading was initially challenging but proved a gratifying experience as more and more emerged from her study that I had not payed attention to in my own reading.
Dr Anna Maria Reimer
Federal Employment Agency
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, January 2016, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/zaa-2016-0010.
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