[smogcutter]

I think you’re talking past each other. Parent is referencing Edward Said, but mixing in an Americanism about “taming the frontier” that doesn’t really apply. Said’s talking more about colonialism.

> Orientalism is an artistic current from the 18th to the early 20th focused on taking inspiration from the faraway, exotic, attractive Eastern cultures.

You’re not wrong, but Said’s work really changed the way that movement is generally understood.

[shakow]

> Said’s work really changed the way that movement is generally understood.

With all due respect to Said, I'm not yet willing to accept the complete redefinition of a term well-anchored in European art history for over two centuries on the basis of a book by a single American scholar -- book which is, moreover, highly debated by other academics of the field.

[smogcutter]

Do you think that the usage in TFA that started this dumb thread was about art history?

Your original response to parent was “I haven’t heard this before, so it must be wrong”. That’s a very boring way to approach the world.

Now you’ve pivoted from saying the usage is unfamiliar to dismissing it as “highly debated by other academics in the field”, implying that you are familiar with it after all! Okay.

Anyway, what a weird hill to die on.

[shakow]

> “I haven’t heard this before, so it must be wrong”

It's rather that all of the definitions of orientalism I have been taught both at home, at school, and in the literature revolve about culture, all the uses of it I have witnessed talk about culture, I have read Salambo, Zadig, and other classics, I have visited museum filled to brim with European paintings from the period depicting odalisques, harems, bedouins, tuaregs, mosques, fantasia, Turkish baths, city drooling of sun on the Mediterranean, I have assisted to Les Indes Galantes, Der Entführung aus dem Serail and the Italian in Algiers, and the only mention I heard of Orientalism being used in this meaning comes from a few Americans, and a mention in the US wiki stating “Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, much academic discourse has begun to use the term "Orientalism" to refer to a general patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies”. So no, I don't intend, for now, to replace the semantic of this centennial word because of a controversial publication.

> implying that you are familiar with it after all!

Familiar with it, as “I just read the wiki page of the author, which is extremely critical against the book”.