ABSTRACT
The Orient for the Orientalist seems to be, above all, a feast of colour: a dazzling spectacle for the western eye. The Orient,1 first and foremost, is a space of pleasure, untouched by the calculating eye/I of rationality. As Edward Said has famously written,
The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behaviour issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached, always ready for new examples of … ‘bizarre jouissance’. The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness.
