Tag: Orientalist

May 10, 2013

Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Introduction
History and lie. Fifth century B.C. Herodotus is equally known as the ‘Father of History’ and the ‘Father of Lies’. His chronological and causal accounts of the Persian Wars may have marked the beginning of history as a discipline, but it was ignored by none, from his contemporaries to his most postmodern commentators, that Herodotus also included in his records some factually questionable episodes…

May 10, 2013

Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Part 1.1
Ten years after the demise of Edward Saïd, the maverick thinker remains one of the most cited and debated upon intellectual of the past half century. The thought of Saïd, and in particular his 1978 masterpiece, Orientalism, is generally perceived as initiator of what would become one of the most active fields of academic research and in some contexts, of activism: post-colonialism…

May 10, 2013

Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Part 1.2
Edward Saïd’s reflections on the powers of the colonizing West on the rest of the world did not arrive in a vacuum. It had forefathers both in terms of the object of analysis, and in the methods he chose to follow…