Page 209 - Memory of the East
P. 209
described or marked by a series of fundamental absences: absence of movement,
absence of reason, absence of order, absence of meaning, etc. In terms of these
features, then the belief that the colonial world should prevail and dominate, and
through its superiority and sovereignty, it had to support those negative features and
make them continue, so it continues to excel and control.
Orientalism, as Timothy Mitchell points out, was part of another larger process.
The nineteenth-century image of the East in Europe was constructed in the light of
not only the diverse studies on honor, romantic novels, and colonial administrations
and institutions but also all those procedures with which Europe began to organize
its cognitive representation process around the world, as manifested in museums,
world exhibitions, architecture, tourism, schooling, research, the fashion or clothing
industry, and the commodification that dominated all aspects of life there in Europe
and the western world in general.
The number of visitors to the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 marking the
centenary of the French Revolution was about thirty-two million people. It was held
to demonstrate the French commercial and military power. The global hegemony of
the West, economically and politically, at the time can also be connected through that
particular tendency of the imagined image of the East, as well as the new distinctive
mechanisms of the imperial age to form the meanings around the world.
Thus, the East has become a subject displayed in museums and galleries for the
viewers to see, contemplate, enjoy and realize its excellence through the special
visual arrangement of the components of the West's artistic, political and economic
cognitive representation of the East that reduced the world to a system of carefully
organized objects to evoke some meanings associated with history, progress, and
superiority, and also turned humans into objects and themes for visual, sensual and
commercial pleasure in an imagined mental image into a photograph and hand-
drawn pictures. Everything was organized to represent, to recall, and to exhibit other
larger things existing outside it. This is how the world was turned into subjects and
represented in the galleries of exhibitions
and museums, this is how things were
changed. Instead of having an "imagined
image" of it, the world itself was brought
(by seizing, stealing, buying and so on,
like monuments, manuscripts, etc.) and
displayed to stress owning it through the
actual acquisition of it and the reality
to which these subjects and others
belong. Also, through self-observation
of the viewer that enjoys contemplation,
exploring these exhibits as subjects. That Eugène Fromentin, 1820 / 1876, Walking Arabs,
Oil on canvas, 53 x 74.5 cm, 1865.
207
absence of reason, absence of order, absence of meaning, etc. In terms of these
features, then the belief that the colonial world should prevail and dominate, and
through its superiority and sovereignty, it had to support those negative features and
make them continue, so it continues to excel and control.
Orientalism, as Timothy Mitchell points out, was part of another larger process.
The nineteenth-century image of the East in Europe was constructed in the light of
not only the diverse studies on honor, romantic novels, and colonial administrations
and institutions but also all those procedures with which Europe began to organize
its cognitive representation process around the world, as manifested in museums,
world exhibitions, architecture, tourism, schooling, research, the fashion or clothing
industry, and the commodification that dominated all aspects of life there in Europe
and the western world in general.
The number of visitors to the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 marking the
centenary of the French Revolution was about thirty-two million people. It was held
to demonstrate the French commercial and military power. The global hegemony of
the West, economically and politically, at the time can also be connected through that
particular tendency of the imagined image of the East, as well as the new distinctive
mechanisms of the imperial age to form the meanings around the world.
Thus, the East has become a subject displayed in museums and galleries for the
viewers to see, contemplate, enjoy and realize its excellence through the special
visual arrangement of the components of the West's artistic, political and economic
cognitive representation of the East that reduced the world to a system of carefully
organized objects to evoke some meanings associated with history, progress, and
superiority, and also turned humans into objects and themes for visual, sensual and
commercial pleasure in an imagined mental image into a photograph and hand-
drawn pictures. Everything was organized to represent, to recall, and to exhibit other
larger things existing outside it. This is how the world was turned into subjects and
represented in the galleries of exhibitions
and museums, this is how things were
changed. Instead of having an "imagined
image" of it, the world itself was brought
(by seizing, stealing, buying and so on,
like monuments, manuscripts, etc.) and
displayed to stress owning it through the
actual acquisition of it and the reality
to which these subjects and others
belong. Also, through self-observation
of the viewer that enjoys contemplation,
exploring these exhibits as subjects. That Eugène Fromentin, 1820 / 1876, Walking Arabs,
Oil on canvas, 53 x 74.5 cm, 1865.
207
