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The harem fantasy in nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings

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Abstract

This article examines Orientalist cultural production through an overview of the literature on Orientalist paintings produced by European artists in the nineteenth century. There is a particular emphasis on gender and sexuality, and the use of depictions of gender and sexuality to undergird the political project of colonialism. Furthermore, these historical depictions continue to provide the symbolic vernacular for contemporary representations of Muslims that have their own political uses in the era of the War on Terror. This overview illuminates the emergence of representations of Muslims in fine art for European audiences beginning in the twelfth century, and the changes those depictions undergo later on in the nineteenth century as the political relationship between “East” and “West” shifts. The piece also takes into account gender in relationship to the act of authoring these representations.

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Notes

  1. Though the United States provided its own specific context in which particular Orientalist tropes would arise and be utilized in the production of fine art, literature and popular culture, there is evidence that U.S. Orientalism also shared commonalities with the British and French trends. Arabian Nights and the story of Scheherazade captured the imaginations of Americans also, and had as much influence in the U.S. as it did in Europe. As they did with European audiences, these stories give rise to similar fixations on the harem, an erotically charged depiction of Oriental women, and their violent and hyper sexualized male counterparts. These depictions evolved alongside the development of media technologies from literary representations to the silver screen in the early twentieth century such as The Sheik (1921) starring Rudolph Valentino. (Little 2002; McAlister 2005).

  2. Said points to particular historical moments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that set the stage for the simultaneous fascination of two colonial rivals France and Britain with Islamic societies, including some initial forays into producing knowledge about the East for European audiences. Chief amongst these are Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and then Syria, a moment that “became the first in a long series of European encounters with the Orient in which the Orientalist’s special expertise was put directly to functional colonial use” (Said 1978, p. 80).

  3. Alloula’s (1986) The Colonial Harem illustrates how harem women were also popular subjects for photographers in Algeria, and those images often became postcards used for souvenirs. The distinction between the ‘high’ art of the unique valued oil painting or water color and the mass produced cheap post card does not disrupt the continuous portrayal of the harem as a site of fascination, and the women who inhabit them, as exotic, alluring, and foreign.

  4. In her essay on Regnault’s Orientalism Clayson writes,

    That a painting on a late medieval Islamic Spanish subject could encapsulate his Moroccan campaign should come as no surprise, insofar as Regnault was on a quest for Moorish Andalusia in modern Morocco. Nor should the fact that it was imagined despite its basis in the architectural research that the artist completed in Granada (Clayson 2002, p. 137).

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Ali, I. The harem fantasy in nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings. Dialect Anthropol 39, 33–46 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-015-9372-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-015-9372-7

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