Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930 NEW

Ewing, New Jersey,: Princeton Univ Press, 2000. First Edition. Hardcover. NEW/NEW. Demy folio, [27.75cm/11inches], full gilt-embossed conifer-green cloth with mylar-protected dust jacket, pp. 242, indexed. Illustrated with b-w halftones, colour plates &ct. Please feel free to ask for particulars and/or additional photographs. ... One reviewer noted: "There is something disconcerting about reviewing a sumptuously produced coffee table book on Orientalism. The risk is that in documenting the legacy of Orientalism in America, the book's representation of naked odalisques, mysterious bazaars, and harems perpetuates the very spectacularization of Asia its essays often decry. Perhaps this paradox accompanies all Orientalist discourse, whether celebratory or critical: in marking the Asian as exotic other, such discourse reinforces western difference and uniqueness. To be sure, the coordinator of the Clark Institute exhibition, Holly Edwards, and her coauthors, are well aware of Orientalism's insidious role in western expansionist and imperialist designs, but the very fact of this full-color, glossy catalogue gives one pause. This caveat aside, the exhibition, held at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2000, comes at a propitious time for "re-orienting" our national perspective on the Middle East. As the "war on terror" helps to perpetuate a view of all Arab men with turbans as terrorists and demonizes Islam as primitive superstition, this survey of an earlier American involvement with the Middle East provides a corrective. While most accounts of Orientalism are based on European—particularly French—models of Islamic culture, less has been said about the range and implications of American concerns with the east. Edward Said's book, Orientalism (1978), explains this avoidance by noting that U.S. political involvement in the regions was less intense than France's imperial adventures in North Africa and the Near East. Edwards counters this view by showing important differences between French Orientalism, epitomized by Jean Léon Gérome's The Snake Charmer (1880) or Slave Market (1866), which focus on the human (preferably naked female) body, and paintings by Frederick Church or Frederick Arthur Bridgman, which feature landscapes. American painters such as Church, Bridgman, Edwin Lord Weeks, and John Singer Sargent, and writers such as Mark Twain and Washington Irving, created picturesque views of the Orient that, as Edwards says, "enabled the viewer to benefit from the lessons embedded in more distant and exotic landscapes" . Such depictions participated in projects of nation building by depicting Moorish Spain or the Holy Land as faded ruins, while offering comforting images of a kinder, gentler world that was being lost to commercialization and industrialization."