The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800 (Critical Issues in History)
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • The Tao of China rising !
  • Must for whoever that are interested in Chinese studies
  • Not too shabby
  • Good introductory book
The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800 (Critical Issues in History)
D. E. Mungello
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0847694402

Book Description

For too long, the history of contact between China and the West has been portrayed as a one-sided encounter: Europeans were said to have discovered China, while Chinese responses to the West went largely unnoticed. In this book, D. E. Mungello dispels the myth that China was a silent partner in the dialogue between Eastern and Western civilizations. Although they did not reciprocate in sending ships, cultural emissaries or religious missionaries westward, neither did the Chinese passively accept Europe's enthusiastic embrace of their culture, arts, and manufactures. Aspects of Western art, science, and religion made significant inroads into Chinese culture, which are only recently coming to the attention of Western historians. And at a time when the West is once again setting its sights on strengthening ties with China, Mungello's work offers crucial historical perspective. It reminds us that the political and economic dominance of the West is actually characteristic of only the past two centuries, prior to which it was China that led the world in terms of economic and political development, and in the sophistication of its high culture and technological achievement. This concise and well-written text will make a wonderful addition to reading lists in East Asian or Chinese History classes, as well as courses on World History. Visit our website for sample chapters.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars The Tao of China rising !.......2007-08-24

Prof. Mungello wrote this comprehensive book on the intercourse of China and West in culture and religion in a highly readable text.
Between 1500-1800, China was a powerful country. Catholics dreamed of converting China into a Christian country. However, it was Chinese influence to Europe to bring about Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. He showed that missionaries sent back Taoism, I Ching and Confucius teaching to the European educated to help bring about the Enlightenment.
What would happen when China is Christianized and the West goes Taoist Way?
By 1800, China was still in its glorious satisfaction while European Powers underwent industrialization. Britain unable to balance the trade deficit pushed opium and war on China. The 1997 Hong Kong Hand-over concluded the last British Imperial chapter in history. China was at its nadir at 1900 Boxer Movement with eight foreign countries invaded Peking.
Napoleon said, "When China wakes, it will shock the world". History affirms the Tao in Eat and West, strong and weak, grandeur and decline, war and peace. Prof. Mungello presents the readers the historical background to understand the modern China. A number of Westerners see Deng's reform with market economy lead to China rising as a world threat. Reading this book will help open up their horizon.

Will US wage war on China in the billions of dollar trade deficit as their British cousins did in 19th Century?

5 out of 5 stars Must for whoever that are interested in Chinese studies.......2003-01-28

Dr. Mungello has done a great job in presenting how the (Far) West met with Chinese culture over the period of 1500-1800. This book was written in easy and non-technical language. As a Chinese that has learnt Chinese history all through my school years, I am intrigued to read simialar materials presented from a Western perspective in simple English.

Dr. Mungello noted that the Chinese in Song Dynasty mistook the picture of Virgin Mary as Guanyin (Chinese Goddess of the sea). A three-story high statue given by Portuguese to Macau, China shortly before 1999 was meant to be Guanyin but it certainly looks like Virgin Mary. What went around has come around:) Thanks for writing such a good book and I enjoyed it very much.

5 out of 5 stars Not too shabby.......2002-11-06

I think Mungello has done a wonderful job in reconstructing the meeting between China and the Western world.

4 out of 5 stars Good introductory book.......2000-04-14

University Profs take note: Although I had to read this book because I was in the author's class at Baylor, it really is a good introductory book. Dr. Mungello is one of the world's top Sinologists and did his graduate work at the U. of California at Berkeley and I am privelaged to be one of his students.

Half of the book is focused at the West meeting China, and the other half is China meeting the West. It answers the questions: What did the West reject and accept from China? What did China accept and reject from the West?
Epic Encounters : Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (American Crossroads) (American Crossroads)
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • Excellent exploration of cultural and social identity
Epic Encounters : Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (American Crossroads) (American Crossroads)
Melani McAlister
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0520244990

Book Description

Epic Encounters examines how popular culture has shaped the ways Americans define their "interests" in the Middle East. In this innovative book--now brought up-to-date to include 9/11 and the Iraq war--Melani McAlister argues that U.S. foreign policy, while grounded in material and military realities, is also developed in a cultural context. American understandings of the region are framed by narratives that draw on religious belief, news media accounts, and popular culture. This remarkable and pathbreaking book skillfully weaves lively and accessible readings of film, media, and music with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy, race politics, and religious history.
The new chapter, titled "9/11 and After: Snapshots on the Road to Empire," considers and brilliantly analyzes five images that have become iconic: (1) New York City firemen raising the American flag out of the rubble of the World Trade Center, (2) the televised image of Osama bin-Laden, (3) Afghani women in burqas, (4) the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in Baghdad, and (5) the hooded and wired prisoner in Abu Ghraib. McAlister's singular achievement is to illuminate the contexts of these five images both at the time they were taken and as they relate to current events, an accomplishment all the more remarkable since--to paraphrase her new preface--we are today struggling to look backward at something that is still rushing ahead.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Excellent exploration of cultural and social identity.......2004-03-18

An incredibly good book. McAlister dissects and analyzes the representations of the Middle East in various media -- movies, news, plays, books, etc. -- and their relationships to the projection of US global power and the shaping of US cultural identity since the end of World War II. As she puts it, her goal is to address the absence of culture from discussions of the history of US imperialism, the absence of empire from discussions of US culture, and the absence of the US from discussions of postcolonial imperialism.

Among her subjects, all of which she treats deftly and with attentive detail, are: Amiri Baraka's "A Black Mass," the Israeli military raid on Entebbe, the 1977 John Frankenheimer movie "Black Friday," the tour of King Tutankhamen's artifacts through the United States during 1977-1978, Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth," the rise of the Moral Majority, the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980 and its obsessive coverage in the US media, the prevalence of military revenge movies in the 1980s like "Navy Seals" and "Delta Force," Betty Mahmoody's book "Not without My Daughter," and the Gulf War.

I found particularly compelling her discussion of 1950s biblical epics, such as "Ben-Hur" and "The Ten Commandments." The recent controversy over "The Passion of the Christ" is put into definite context when you see how "The Ten Commandments" was received (and what purposes it served) when it was released in 1956.
Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • So much more nuanced than Edward Said
  • first impression excellent - except for the painfully small font!
  • Mind changing
  • brilliant, scholarly & beyond Said's orientalism
Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought
J.J. Clarke
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415133769

Book Description

The West has long had an ambivalent attitude toward the philosophical traditions of the East. Voltaire claimed that the East is the civilization "to which the West owes everything", yet C.S. Peirce was contemptuous of the "monstrous mysticism of the East". And despite the current trend toward globalizations, there is still a reluctance to take seriously the intellectual inheritance of South and East Asia.

Oriental Enlightenment challenges this Eurocentric prejudice. J. J. Clarke examines the role played by the ideas of Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism in the intellectual life of the West and how these ideas, far more than exotic distractions, or even instruments of colonial domination, have been the means towards serious self-questioning and self-renewal, used to dispute and even to undermine Western orthodoxies.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars So much more nuanced than Edward Said.......2006-09-04

This book is principally an examination and explanation of how the West has seen the philosophies, religions and cultures of the Far East - chiefly of China and India. To this interest in the East Clarke gives the name Orientalism. That word since 1985 has carried the connotation that Edward Said gave to it in his book of that name. Though that work concerned itself chiefly with the Arab Middle East, other scholars have applied Said's characterization to the western study of cultures further East. That school of thought saw Orientalism as permeated with condescending, exploitative and colonialist attitudes, and scarcely allowed any other factors to play a role. Clarke admits that colonial attitudes were one aspect of Orientalism, but his study demonstrates that there were many others. True, students of Orientalism, like students of all other subjects, cannot help having agendas, and agendas are liable to lead to distortions. So the West's interpretations of the Orient (the word `hermeneutic' turns up with rather tiresome frequency in this text) generally fulfil some need felt by the West; but this is often not at all a need to exploit the East, but rather to gain through Oriental studies a new and enriching perspective on Western culture and frequently to provide a remedy for what are perceived to be its flaws or discontents.

Clarke argues, along with other scholars whom he cites, that in the West the Renaissance and the Reformation ushered in a philosophical restlessness and uncertainty which made Europeans be more inquisitive and open to other ways of thinking. This uncertainty was generated from within European culture, whereas in Asia it was only when Western technology and power irrupted into the area that the interest of Asians in European culture began, in response to a challenge from outside rather than from within their own culture. Clarke acknowledges this interest, but devotes only a small part of the book to the impact of Western thought on Asia.

He documents how in the 18th century the philosophes set up their rosy view of Confucian China in opposition to the religious and social criticisms they made of their own society; how, when this interest faded, it was replaced in the 19th century by the interest of the Romantics in Indian thought. We learn of Anquetil Duperron (1723 to 1805) who first translated the Upanishads (into French) and of William Jones (1746 to 1794), who showed that most European languages have an affinity with Sanskrit, which suggested that many of the peoples of Europe came originally from Asia. German nationalists, resenting French cultural hegemony, preferred the idea that their culture was rooted in the Aryan languages (and later, by a perversion of the word, in the Aryan race). Philosophically also, the most profound impact of Indian thought was on a line of German philosophers: Hegel, Schelling, Schlegel and Schopenhauer saw an affinity between the monism of the Absolute and that of Brahman, between their own metaphysical ideas that the world as we know it through our senses is not the real world and the Indian notion that we see the world only through the veil of maya. Both Confucianism and Buddhism were seen by many Europeans as a system of ethics which was independent of a belief in God, and was therefore espoused by many western thinkers in reaction to the claims that religion was the essential basis of ethics.

Towards the end of the 19th century and into the twentieth, at the very time when the West's cultural imperialism emphasized by Edward Said was at its height, there was also the countervailing current that the West's cultural hegemony was increasingly questioned in the West itself; and the interest in Eastern ideas became a broad stream with wide diffusion. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 to 1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817 to 1862) popularized Eastern thought in America on a scale that earlier thinkers had not been able to achieve. Edwin Arnold's poem The Light of Asia (1879), disseminated the Buddhist message and sold nearly a million copies. The Theosophical Society, founded by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Alcott in 1875, had over 45,000 members in 1920. It was strongly infused with oriental ideas, and even played a part in the revival of Hindu and Buddhist self-awareness and self-respect in Asia itself. Some Western actually thought that western civilization, with its frenetic materialism and its spiritual life eroded by rationalism, was worn out and needed to draw on Eastern thought to renew itself. Eastern influences have moved out of the academic and literary world to permeate the very life-style of many westerners.

So Zen and Tibetan Buddhism have found many followers in the West; there are now many practitioners of t'ai chi, yoga and transcendental meditation; the young have gone on the hippy trail to visited ashrams in India. From this point onwards, about half way through the book, Clarke produces so many examples of the interaction between East and West - on literature, on the arts, on religion, on psychotherapy, on holistic medicine, on ecological thinking, on non-violence, even on the philosophy of modern physics (though, curiously, only marginally on the mainstreams of western academic philosophy) - that a short review like this cannot do justice to them. There was even a strand in fascism which claimed an Oriental heritage. Clarke's range is truly encyclopaedic, and in this second half of the book that there will be found much detailed material and many names that are likely to be unfamiliar to the educated non-specialist.

The mainly narrative chapters are followed by two final superb reflective ones. In the first of these Clarke reflects on the philosophical traps into which Orientalism can fall and sometimes has fallen, but his defence of the value of Orientalism is eloquent and persuasive. In the second (more difficult) one he shows how deconstructive Post-Modernism challenges Orientalism but can also find an ally in it.

4 out of 5 stars first impression excellent - except for the painfully small font!.......2006-08-19

I've only read the first chapter so far, my first impressions of the content are excellent, but I have a complaint for the publisher: the font is painfully small and makes it actually a bit of struggle to read.

The ideas are very dense, so I would tend to make the font and line spacing a bit bigger than usual to reduce the strain in that area of comprehension and save the reader's mental energy for understanding the ideas rather than screwing their eyes up at the type. I'm not exaggerating - it's like the size they usually print footnotes in!

5 out of 5 stars Mind changing.......2003-08-07

I'll like to write this review partly in relation to the last one written for this book, which, I think, many people will find quite daunting. While I'd agree with the author of that review about the excellence of the book I'd like to give a more accessible view, hoepfully just as Clarke's book provides an accessible approach to very difficult ideas.

Firstly, ,any readers are likely to be put off by all the references to those very difficult postmodern (etc) philosophers who are mentioned, either because they'll think, a) I won't understand that, or b) I'm not into postmodernism. To set your minds at rest, Clarke doesn't engage in the lingusitic exercises of using almost indecipherable language to say very little that is typical of many of this school, also, he sets the postmodern agenda (or, at least parts of it) firmly in his sights and demolishes many of their empty stances based on ideology not fact or reason.

As such we can recommend this book to a)anyone who either doesn't know much about orientalism - he provides an excellent introduction as well as analysis; b) anyone who doesn't know much about postmodernism, as you'll be treated to a critical survey of certain aspects of it; c) supporters of postmodernism, as you'll find an able voice against whom you need to defend your ideas; d) a whole range of people not at all interested in orientalism and postmodernism but who have interests in such things as cross-cultural encounter, especially between Europe and Asia, religion, modern European thought, etc.

As to the contents of this book, Clarke surveys the history of the encounter between East and West (Asia and Europe) to show that claims that the two stand as polar opposites which have no connection is untenable. with lucid commentary, clarke deals with the views of orientalists and postmodernists and presnts a more balanced and less Euro-centric approach. for more details, using technical terms which Clarke aptly leads the uninitiated through with subtlety and clarity, whilst providing new insights which will give food for thought for even those well read within this area.

5 out of 5 stars brilliant, scholarly & beyond Said's orientalism.......2000-07-07

Clarke uses the following Framework for intercultural contact: - Gadamer: hermeneutics of the dialogue: it comes bit by bit, and entails a continuous exchange of meaning between interpreter and interpreted, the goal is 'fusion of conceptual horizons' which requires 'self-awareness of difference' and 'recognition of otherness of the other'. Problem: doesn't take into account underlying discursive power relations (Foucault) - Said: the influence (power) that the west exerted via colonisation, to secure world hegemony, is present in the image that has been created of the East in the West. Everybody involved in orientalism is consciously or not guilty of western imperialism. Clarke says that this image of Said is not complete and shows that interest for the East has often been connected to pragmatic interests, deeply rooted in Europe's own intellectual, cultural and political history. Orientalism often had a countercultural, counterhegemonic rol in the past three centuries and has often been source of energy for radical protest. This way orientalism has often not enforced Europe's established role and identity, but undermined it. Periods of cultural revolution and global expansion in Europe made it possible to create a painful void in the spiritual and intellectual heart of Europe, but also favoured the establishment of certain geopolitical conditions that allowed the transmission of alternative worldviews of the East to the West more easily.

The making of "the Orient"

Both the French Sinophile Enlightenment thinkers and the German Indophile Romantici used orientalism as instrument for the subversion and reconstruction of European civilization, to fight the deeply rooted evils of that time. This way they idealized and romanticized heavily eastern thought and culture. Confucianism gave the French a model for rationalistic, deistic philosophy, but also the Hinduism of the Upanishads gave the Germans an elevated metaphysical system that resonated with their idealist suppositions, as a counterweight to the materialistic and mechanistic philosophy that came to dominate the Enlightenment period.Buddhism: Schopenhauer formulates a radical critique on the Jewish-Christian tradition that searches salvation throught a divine Savior, while buddhism searches it by denial of the will. Wagner and Nietzsche give similar critiques because buddhism, so they claim, offers a psychologically more honest explanation of suffering. Because of the Victorian crisis of faith and belief in progress, and the apparent compatibility of buddhism and science (positivism, Darwinism, evolutionism, materialism, monism), buddhism gains importance. Also the American transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau) used buddhism against Lockean materialism and Calvinism, in their belief in the essential unity and spiritual nature of the cosmos, combined with a belief in the goodness of humans, and the domination of intuition over rational thinking.Besides romanticizing voices, also racist and denigrating voices are found in orientalist discourses.

Twentieth century

Because of the quick progress and economic and social transformation of traditional to modern, Europe experienced an atmosphere of malcontentment with the promises of Western civilization, which made it search for more meaningful and satisfying alternatives. There are two types of associations of the turbulent twentieth century with orientalism: on the one hand the creative involvement in philosophy, theology, psychology, science and ecology, and on the other hand associations with occultism, and mystical undercurrents of fascism. In a period of growing imperialist expansion (which enhanced communication with the East), there was a possibility to begin to see the East really as other (with a different culture), but there was also a sense of being afraid, mixed with feelings of guilt toward the East. This had a different intellectual response: on the one hand there were big speculations about a universal philosophy or global religion, on the other hand there were more modest propositions for the encouragement of a hermeneutical dialogue. There was a tremendous spread of orientalism in the twentieth century, buddhist monasteries arised in the West, poets, writers, hippies and Beat movement, and also New Agers made use of Eastern thought, though not all of them seriously. Academic institutions were built, and eastern scholars came to Europe. Important European thinkers were influenced by the East. This accelerated the understanding of Eastern thought.

Philosophy

- Universalism (Leibniz, Moore) - Comparative philosophy (Nagarjuna compared with Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, Madhyamaka with Wittgenstein) - Hermeneutics (Rorty: "the conversation of mankind", Larson: "from talking to one another, to talking with one another") - Diversity, otherness, difference, but a sharp awareness of the danger of cultural imperialism

Religion

- Exclusivism - Inclusivism - Pluralism

Psychology

- Psychotherapy and mental health: holistic contextual approach of the individual, more emphasis on experiential knowledge than on intellectual knowledge - Fromm, Jung, Maslow, Naranjo, Ornstein - Transpersonal, humanistic, cognitive psychology - Meditation

Science and ecology

- Sovjet Marxism and buddhism - Capra, Jung, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Prigogine, Bohm - Schumacher, Naess, Macy - Wholeness (holistic medicine, ecology)

Reflections

Besides the problem of interpretation of different cultures, there 's also a problem of projection: Eastern ideas are appropriated by simply projecting them to categories and presuppositions of the West, and the West has become a sort of all-eating monster, usurping all cultures. Clarke claims the aim is not to avoid use of a vocabulary that is derived from the own culture, but that the crucial point is that one does so with critical self-awareness. He emphasizes the importance of mutuality in the hermeneutical process: interpretation begins with pre-conceptions that are replaced by more appropriate conceptions. Example: the wrong understanding the West had (and still has) throughout buddhist history doesn't have to be considered as a failure, but as a necessary and wholesome "turning of the hermeneutical wheel". Orientalism contributed, so says Clarke, to a growth in mutuality, dialogue, knowledge and sympathy, and this while the East has now on the one hand enhanced grip to its own tradition (partly as a result of the encounter with the West) and on the other hand can formulate a solid critique to fundamental aspects of western culture. Also Said believed in a postcolonial era, where an increasingly sophisticated study and criticical self-awareness would make possible a post-orientalist epoch where westerners could approach the East without disturbing presuppositions.
Marcia Lippman Sacred Encounters: East and West
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • A luminous movie
Marcia Lippman Sacred Encounters: East and West
Bell Hooks , Barbara Grizzuti Harrison , and Marcia Lippman
Manufacturer: Edition Stemmle
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3908163269

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars A luminous movie.......2001-02-28

This work is like encountering a strange film which, after a while seems not to be a film at all but an experience you are having, a kind of a journey that you don't remember setting out on. It takes you through England, Bali, Cambodia, Italy, through time, through light. In the end, as with all good journeys, you are someplace else and you are a little different, though in ways you can't describe. That's what is so great about this book; it takes you someplace in a way that lies outside summation.
East Against West: The First Encounter: The Life of Themistocles
Average customer rating: Not rated
    East Against West: The First Encounter: The Life of Themistocles
    Dmitry Shlapentokh
    Manufacturer: PublishAmerica
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

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    ASIN: 1413756913

    Book Description

    The United States is possibly the last Western empire that has tried to impose the global predominance of the West. It was assumed in the beginning of the war in the Middle East that American success was predestined and that this encounter would be similar to the first Greek and Persian War in 5 B.C. It is from this prospective that historians have approached the event. This book challenges this assumption. The great Persians had a much greater chance for victory than the Greeks. It was just luck and the genius of a few Greek politicians that saved the West.
    East-West Encounters
    Average customer rating: Not rated
      East-West Encounters
      Sylvie Blum-Reid
      Manufacturer: Wallflower Press
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Paperback

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      ASIN: 1903364671

      Book Description

      East-West Encounters: Franco-Asian Cinema and Literature is the first book of its kind to examine Franco-Asian film and literary productions in the context of France's postcolonial history. It covers French film-makers' approaches to the Asian 'Other', as well as focusing on the works of Vietnamese and Cambodian directors living and working in France. The book thus examines this important contemporary example of cultural exchange and establishes a dialogue between producers and consumers of exoticised images. It features extensive studies of key texts such as Emmanuelle, Indochine, The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo.

      Word and Silence: Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Spiritual Encounter Between East and West
      Average customer rating: Not rated
        Word and Silence: Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Spiritual Encounter Between East and West
        Raymond Gawronski
        Manufacturer: Eerdmans Pub Co
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        Binding: Hardcover

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        Cross-Cultural Encounters and Conflicts (Studies in Middle Eastern History)
        Average customer rating: 2 out of 5 stars
        • A disappointment!
        Cross-Cultural Encounters and Conflicts (Studies in Middle Eastern History)
        Charles Issawi
        Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Hardcover

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        ASIN: 0195118138

        Book Description

        Charles Issawi's collection of essays, Cross-Cultural Encounters and Conflicts, has been written in the belief that a study of the past encounters and conflicts between the world's major cultures can shed light on their nature and importance. Though the emphasis is on the Middle East, of which Issawi is one of our foremost scholars, the subjects covered here range in scope from the great ancient civilizations to Shelley's passion for the Middle East, from the failures of the Greeks as empire builders to the preeminence of English as an international language today. Other essays examine either the way in which certain cultures were formed, or the effects of the direct control of one culture over another, or cross-cultural perceptions, most notably the dramatic change in the Western perception of the Orient between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this age of multiculturalism, conflicts between the world's cultures have become a dominant feature of the international landscape. This excellent collection is a much-needed exploration of their historical nature.

        Customer Reviews:

        2 out of 5 stars A disappointment!.......2003-01-12

        I found this work to be a superficial treatment of a very complex topic. The study of Muslims in the West has been studied in great detail by Dr. Sami Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh. This work pales by comparison.
        Arab Representation of Occident: East- West Encounters in Arabic Fiction (Culture and Civilization in the Middle East)
        Average customer rating: Not rated
          Arab Representation of Occident: East- West Encounters in Arabic Fiction (Culture and Civilization in the Middle East)
          Rasheed El-Enany
          Manufacturer: Routledge
          ProductGroup: Book
          Binding: Hardcover

          ArabicArabic | Middle Eastern | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
          GeneralGeneral | Middle Eastern | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
          GeneralGeneral | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
          GeneralGeneral | Sociology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
          Ethnic StudiesEthnic Studies | Special Groups | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
          All TitlesAll Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
          ASIN: 0415332176

          Book Description

          This book explores Arab responses to Western culture and values as expressed mainly through works of fiction written by Arab authors during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It provides welcome new insights into the perennial East-West debate, and is particularly relevant to the current discussion on Islam and the West.

          Arab Representations of the Occident might be seen as the reverse study of Edward Said's famous Orientalism. If Orientalism, according to Said, provided the conceptual framework, the intellectual justification for the appropriation of the Orient through colonialism, "Occidentalism" - if one may use this label to indicate Arab conceptualizations of the West - tells a different story. It is a story, not about the appropriation of the land of the West, but its very soul. And if Orientalism was about the denigration, and the subjugation of the Oriental Other, much of Occidentalism has been about the idealization of the Western Other, the desire to become the Other, or atleast to become like the Other.

          Alongside raising highly topical questions about stereotypical ideas about Arabs and Muslims in general, this book - the first book on the subject in English - explores representations of the West by the foremost Arab intellectuals over a two-century period, right up to the present day.

          Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter
          Average customer rating: Not rated
            Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter
            Fred R. Dallmayr
            Manufacturer: State University of New York Press
            ProductGroup: Book
            Binding: Paperback

            GeneralGeneral | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
            GeneralGeneral | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
            GeneralGeneral | Sociology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
            CultureCulture | Sociology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
            ASIN: 0791430707

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