Orientalism in arts and crafts revisited

Edward Said’s Orientalism was a highly seductive book exercising powerful influences well beyond Said’s own literary field. To take but two examples, it became the foundation text of the group of historians known as the post-colonials; it also influenced a number of art historians who found in it new ways of interpreting Orientalist art. ¹ For them, the extraordinary flowering of artistic expressions of Oriental subjects could be explained as yet another western mode for representing, and therefore mis-representing, the Orient in the era of western imperialism. Such artistic expressions could be seen as a visual form of the West’s appropriation of Eastern subjects, yet another tool in the establishment of power and authority. Such slanted images of the Orient could be found not only in the canvases of large numbers of artists who travelled in and painted the East, but also in various other cultural artefacts, including performances on the stage. These performances invariably involved the art of the scene painter, another important means of presenting the East to a western public. ² Thus, the Orient was also the setting for plays and operas, starting in the eighteenth century and fully flowering in the nineteenth. ³